#fieldstone

Henry DiSpirito (USA, 1898 - 1995)

Leaping Frog, 1947

Fieldstone, 13 1/4 x 20 1/2 x 8 1/4 in. (33.7 x 52.1 x 21 cm)

Copshaholm is a 38-room Romanesque Queen Anne mansion in South Bend, Indiana.  Designed by New York architect Charles Alonzo Rich, it was built in 1895-96 for the family of J. D. Oliver, president of the Oliver Chilled Plow Works.  Oliver’s father, James, invented the chilled plow (see adjacent post). Copshaholm was the name of a village in Scotland near his birthplace.

Part 5

The Basement is the reason I visited twice. That's what happens when you're too chicken shit the first time. It looks darker from the top of the stairs. That's because there is an open door at the bottom that leads into a pitch black cold room. The door is blocking the light from the basement windows.

Past the door the space opens up. A crack in the foundation runs north to south and heaves the floor up. Sinking, then, is the right answer for why the windows on the west side sit below ground level. Two by four boards have been wedged into the windows to try to keep the earth out, but the wall beneath the sunk windows is wet. Straight ahead of the stairs is an old crooked legged school desk.

Off to the right a few forgotten cast iron cookers. I wonder if the only reason they haven't been stolen, besides the people keeping watch over the building, is if they're too heavy to get up the stairs and too rusty to be worth anything. On the east side is a coal room, part of the access boarded up, broken furniture and garbage on what's left of the heap of coal that was used to heat the building. The coal chute itself has been filled in with concrete.

I can hear something in the room tap-tapping away at intervals. It's what I was looking for. The reason I couldn't not go back and go in the basement was the the furnace. See, upstairs, in the middle of the floor is a big iron grate, twice the size of your average manhole. With no stove upstairs and no radiators I knew there had to have been central heating. I wasn't disappointed. A massive cast iron coal burning furnace dominates the basement. It opens at the top right up through that grate. A stove pipe funnelled the smoke to the brick chimney. It's the stove pipe that's tapping at me. A little iron hatch swinging in the wind coming down the chimney from outside.

Curiosity satisfied.

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