THE COTTAGE MYSTERY SERIES

PART TWO of THE COTTAGE MYSTERY SERIES

A few weeks ago, we revealed the first mystery at the cottage, The First Clue.

It began with two chimney caps rising from the roof. Then, during an annual fireplace inspection, it was discovered that the single chimney had two completely separate flues.

That shouldn’t have been particularly unusual for an eighty-year-old house, except that the cottage had only one fireplace. A single known fireplace in the sitting room led us on a search for the origins of the second flue.

Down in the Basement

Over time, most of the basement had been dried in and finished out. While there were still some areas that had exposed pipes and floor joists running overhead, there was one area that stood out among everything else. In the center of the basement was a single brick wall.

We had seen it plenty of times.

At first, there wasn’t much reason to think of it as anything more than part of an old basement left for character. But once we knew there was an unexplained second flue inside the chimney, details we had previously overlooked began to feel a little more important.

We started looking at the wall differently. Built into the old brickwork was an opening… a stovepipe hole. Suddenly, the second flue wasn’t quite so unexplained.

Today, when we think about a chimney, we tend to think about a fireplace. But that wasn’t always a chimney’s only purpose. In older houses, chimneys and flues could also serve heating equipment and stoves. A round opening in brickwork allowed a stovepipe to enter the chimney and carry smoke upward through the flue. And here, beneath our little 1945 cottage, was evidence that something had once done exactly that.

At the time, we couldn’t know simply by looking at the opening what had once been connected to it or precisely how that part of the basement had been used.

But we could see what remained… an old brick wall with a stove opening and a new mystery to solve.

That is one of the strange things about getting to know an old house. A detail can sit quietly in front of you for months without meaning very much at all until it does. Once we started asking questions, the basement began raising a few others, because the brick wall wasn’t the only unusual thing waiting beneath the cottage.

At first, we did not know the whole story. But little by little, the cottage was beginning to show us where to look. And this time, the next clue wasn’t above our heads. It had been waiting below our feet.

Next Week

Not every piece of the cottage’s history was hidden.

Next week, we step away from the mysteries and spend a little time with something that has been part of the house for generations: the hearth at the heart of the home.