Coal Bin Flag

The dirtiest part of resurrecting this old house was cleaning the coal bin.

If you’ve never been in a coal bin, you may not have a sense of how coal dust can get everywhere. I mean ev-er-y-where.  Coal dust is insidious.  It gets everywhere on your body – even in places you didn’t know you had places.  And it instantly goes airborne when disturbed from its decades-long slumber.

A normal shop vacuum filter has no use in this environment.  Coals dust passes right through the filter.  The only way to capture the dust is with one of the expensive filters.

Our coal bin took two days to clean and dismantle.

The best part about the job was finishing.  The second best part was this old flag.

This 48 star flag is easy to date.  Arizona, our 48^th state was added in 1912, roughly four years after Harry & Carrie Benham built this great old house.   It was replaced by our current 50 star flag in 1960 when Alaska and Hawaii were added to the Union.  So in 2007 when I found this flag in the coal bin it was between 47 and 95 years old.

I can’t narrow it down any more than that, but I like to imagine the flag was placed there about the time the old coal burner furnace was converted to gas – maybe in the 1950s.

As you can see its pretty well worn out, its been wet too. 

So were a couple of boys using the now abandoned coal bin as a hideout? Did the 1950's mom throw a fit when they came upstairs all black with coal dust?  Ah… if only this old house could tell me more….