This is the old root cellar in Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, that got us started collecting root cellars.
Slowly we are carving a new lifestyle. To some it might seem to be one that is looking backward, for it cherishes the homely, the rude, the unpackaged, the unmechanized, the careful. We do not think of it as a blind shutting out of any visions of the future, but rather, for us, the right way to face the future. The carving is not easy. It is often painful. But in it are the seeds of sanity, of joy.
Mara Cary Basic Baskets
Our interest in root cellars goes way back — to the years when our children were young and we were driving the back roads of central Pennsylvania’s lovely Buffalo Valley in search of a farm to buy. On one of our rambles, we discovered a real beauty — a classic stone-faced root cellar dug into a hill. We wished, as only a land-hungry young couple can, that it belonged to us. In a way, that splendid old root cellar does belong to us, because Mike took a picture of it — a picture that we still enjoy looking at now that we’ve found some land of our own and settled in. In another sense, the cellar belongs to us because living with that picture has influenced us. It has said something to us about forethought, preparation, and generous provisioning — and about building a pleasing structure for even the most utilitarian purpose.
We have, in fact, come to see the root cellar as a true expression of folk craft — a thing people make to serve their everyday needs. It is one of the few (mostly) unregulated things you can build in most communities today. The appropriate use of found materials to suit a particular site and family delights us with its varied, sturdy, homey results.
This is the old root cellar in Buffalo Valley, Pennsylvania, that got us started collecting root cellars.
Although we’ve done the usual sightseeing with our family — Williamsburg, the Smithsonian, the Liberty Bell, Yellowstone Park, Broadway, and the beach — we must confess that what really has most often intrigued us in our travels has been the little backyard gardens, homemade birdhouses, and north-slope root cellars we’ve seen along the way. When we finally realized that these are the things that have meaning for us, we started to take short rambling trips to search them out.
Our previous rather casual game of collecting root cellar ideas intensified when we started to plan a brand-new root cellar for the small house we intended to build here on our farm. In our search for the best root cellar plans, we consulted books and fellow gardeners and met many warm and interesting people along the way. We found so much good information that we decided it should be shared.
Thus this book has grown out of our interest in what people are really doing, on their own, to keep vegetables and fruits from the fall harvest for winter eating. We will tell you what a conventional root cellar looks like and show you how to build one, but we will also show you all kinds of improvised and ingenious systems that people have figured out for themselves, and that work.
There is something about a root cellar, for those who have experienced childhood winters of dependence on such stored bounty, that calls up associations of “home” and “security.” More than a few of our older informants grew misty eyed as they told us about root cellars they had hand-dug or once owned (including a built-for-the-ages masterpiece roofed by a century-old brick arch), or to which they had been sent as children to bring up the potatoes for dinner. One young contractor even told us how he left a big boulder exposed in the wall of a basement room of a house he had built because he remembered his grandfather’s stone-walled root cellar and hoped that perhaps someone would appreciate that room.
In our own experiments with storing live winter vegetables we’ve rediscovered another pleasure — akin to the contentment of dressing by the warm fire on a cold morning — and that’s the pleasure of delving into one’s own store for food to put on the winter table. As we shiver our way back to the warm kitchen with parsnips in our pockets, a handful of potatoes, and a bag of carrots, we feel very good about it all because we’ve managed to grow it and keep it. We wish each of you the same kind of satisfaction.
Mike and Nancy Bubel
Wellsville, PA