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, Education/Indian Village Manager, Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum. Fire in the tradition bark lodges of the Eastern woodland indian were necessary for warmth, light to work by and cooking. It is the hearth by which the people gathered to share the day's events and socialize. If the fire was not prepared correctly and smoked excessively no one would want to be near it or in the lodge. You would have to understand the details to making an inside fire work for you rather than against you.
Using the traditional bark lodges in the Indian village at Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum we have learned a few of these necessary lessons about bark lodge fires.
Basic Bark Lodge Fires 101
One of the first things learned was to try to make a fire that doesn’t smoke. There are times when you don’t want a really big, hot fire; especially if the weather is mild and what you really need is a small fire for cooking and light. Making the fire with smaller sticks, not big pieces of wood can help to keep it burning bright without a lot of smoke. The Patuxent native peoples probably made their fires with smaller sticks, since they were using stone tools and bare hands to collect firewood.
The second thing is to close off the doorways of the bark lodge. The breeze will come in the doors and cause the smoke to swirl around, instead of going up and out the smokehole. Closing off the doors also keeps it warmer inside, creating a larger difference between inside and outside air temperature, helping to force the hotter air up and out of the smokehole.
Valuable Lessons from Spending Time in the Lodge
When I spent my first winter night in the village's Turtle Lodge (the second biggest lodge, so named because a box turtle kept coming into the lodge) I discovered something really important – make the smokeholes big enough to let the smoke out.
It had gotten pretty late, and I had been struggling all evening with the smoke, when it suddenly dawned on me that the smokeholes were simply too small. I had to climb up on the roof in the darkness and adjust the bark to open them up, with smoke coming up in my face all the time, but it made a big difference. It remained just as warm inside the lodge-- smoke just went out faster.
Something else I have struggled with is the smokeflaps over the smokeholes. It seems simple enough – put a piece of bark on the roof and prop it up with a stick to make a smokeflap that will keep the rain out. But the bark must be framed with sticks or it will curl up and become useless as it changes with the wetting and drying of the weather; it has to be lashed to the roof so it won’t blow away with a gust of wind; it also can’t flop around sideways or it will knock the prop stick loose and fall shut. Getting all of these factors to work together is not that easy. I have started using two prop sticks, one on each side, with the base of the smokeflap lashed pretty close to the roof and this helps to keep them from flopping around.
Most of the time I don’t need to adjust the smokeflap, but a few weeks ago I spent the day in the big lodge, trimming stalks of golden rod and horse weed to save for hand drill sticks. It was a really rotten day with rain and sleet coming down. I got a good fire going but the storm was blowing from the north, a bad direction for that smokeflap, and it did blow in from time to time. I finally lowered the big smokeflap to just a few inches above the roof and that worked pretty well. I kept the fire burning high and hot and it forced the smoke out the smaller opening. Putting mats up against the inside of the bark wall to block the drafts made it much more comfortable where I was sitting. My radio has a built-in thermometer and at one point it read sixty-six degrees even though it was barely above freezing outside.
It can be challenging to have a fire in the longhouse without it being too “smoakie,” but it really is nice to sit around a good fire and really rewarding when you rediscover things that the people who came before had to learn.
Come visit the Jefferson Patterson Park and Museum's Indian village soon!
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