When my family moved into our bungalow in 1979, we confronted a monster of a furnace. A huge metal cylinder — probably five feet in diameter — squatted on one side of the basement, sporting a half-dozen thick arms bending upwards to all corners of the house. As I ducked under one of the asbestos-wrapped pipes to get a closer look, the seller said, “That’s our octopus. It burns gas now, but it was originally a sawdust burner.”
“What on earth?” I said. As it turns out, such a contraption was not uncommon in NE Portland, I discovered, when I found online conversations on the topic between PDX old-timers.
The story starts with timber. Our beautiful forested state has long been a national leader in lumber production, but one ongoing problem of milling logs into boards is the waste. Almost half of a tree can end up as wood scraps and sawdust. That highly flammable mill detritus can’t just pile up. Longtime residents remember sawdust-incinerating wigwam burners that used to dot Oregon. And inventors didn’t figure out until the late 1930s that you could mix sawdust and wood chips with resin and press it into particleboard. Before that, another solution in urban areas was to sell sawdust for home heating.
Some years ago, varying accounts of how this whole operation worked were posted on a now-defunct Facebook page. A truck — maybe from the Albina Fuel Company, which had a huge sawdust pile next to the freeway at NE 33rd and Broadway — would dump a load onto a customer’s driveway. Then it would be shoveled by a crew or residents through a low window to a large basement “sawdust room.” One poster reminisced about the great smell of “fresh clean sawdust piled to the ceiling” and another remembered, “This big pile was a great playground for my sisters and me; we’d play ‘King of the Hill’ and build tunnels through it.”
The furnace had a big hopper attached to it. You’d use a five-gallon bucket to fill the hopper a couple of times a day with sawdust, which would slowly sink to the burn chamber. If the fuel got hung up in the hopper and the stove went out, you’d have to bang on the beast to dislodge the clot, then relight the furnace with newspaper and kindling, like starting a campfire. A chain ran upstairs that you could use to open or close a vent on the front of the firebox to increase or slow the combustion rate, thereby controlling the temperature.
The heat rose up the huge arms by gravity. For the whole operation then, no motor was required, no blowers, and no electricity — a simple, efficient system.
By the year we moved into our house, that old furnace had been converted to gas, but it still had no blower. When we replaced it and its asbestos-taped web of pipes with a more efficient, safer, less space-gobbling furnace, we realized we missed the quiet of no fan. But not the thought of a monster octopus lurking in the basement.
BWNA board member Tim Gillespie was a public school teacher in the Portland area for almost four decades. He is a widely published poet and essayist.