Tea Kettles

I performed my bi-annual cleaning and polishing of our kitchen cupboards today as the rainy day sent me inside to work The kitchen we resurrected in this old farmhouse has high ceilings and a space above the modern cabinets where I display family heirlooms and other things I enjoy from a distance - an old cookie jar, the beautiful re-purposed old canning jar decorated with lilacs painted by my friend Olga, and an assortment of old pitchers. 

There are two tea kettles up there - the Revere ware one that simmered endlessly on the burner-with-a-brain on Thelma Metzger's kitchen gas range and this one from my side of the family.

from Allegany County, N.Y. to
Potter County, Pennsylvania

I remember this old kettle holding a potted plant on the terrace in our backyard when I was a teenager. Some years ago, my mother decided I should have it. She tucked a little note inside that told its history. It had belonged to her grandmother, Abbie Collins Fish who lived in Whitesville, Allegany County, New York.

My grandfather (W.D. Fish, known as Golly to his readers in The Potter Enterprise) writes of its storied history in one of his newspaper columns.

"Mother's old tea kettle - Golly has it. We are going to write about that antique utensil some of these days, of how Mother, a great reader, would let her light kettle melt its seams while she was all wrapped up in a story or article, and she would have to return to the very old and very heavy kettle to use until the sum of money was available to buy another."

Happy Mother's Day!

Addendum April 15, 2024

Scanning old photo negatives (these from the 1930s) brings serendipitous surprise!

 I've marked it with an arrow so you can see my great-grandmother's tea kettle on the gas heating stove in the front office of the old Potter Enterprise building.