Historic Brick House Chimneys/Chimney Design
I’m working on an old solid brick farmhouse that has four separate chimneys. With exception for the living room fireplace, each room has a thimble port for connecting a stove pipe to a chimney built-right-in the old brick. That’s fairly common, though, right? What I find to be strange is the chimneys don’t start until 8 or 9 foot off the floor! There’s just a bumb-out coming into the room. With big round metal caps currently plugging the holes. The inside and outside walls are untouched, from what I can see. So I think that is all original. Even still, didn’t they have to clean out the things once in a while? While googleing it, I saw diagrams with places ash could fall for removal, but these chimneys aren’t much bigger inside than about two standard bricks butted together. A total cross sectional area of about 16in×4in, so they don’t have much room to spare.
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It was a common chimney design in houses here in NW Ohio. In the few late 1800 farm houses I lived or worked in and maybe some in town. Often in 2 stories that chimney bump out was in the upstairs. The stove pipe from the wood burner would run up through a thimble in the floor to isolate from the framing and also to add some more “pipe heat” to the room above.
A floor register was not uncommon either.
Never did see a clean out , though we would clean ours using various modified chimney sweep techniques.
One year a train car of coke left the track up the road from us. We took the pickup up a lane and commenced to clean up the mess that was left. Kind of a reverse Alice’s Restaurant Massacre sort of deal.
The farmer who owned the property abutting drove up in his pickup. Mind you, this was 1974. He asked the obvious of what we were doing. Environmental cleanup could have been the response....
Instead of pulling out his shotgun for trespassers, he told us to hang on......he’d go get his loader.
One more step in hippie/farmer relations. And that fuel turned the cast iron stove glow red.
Back to your original question. If you open the wall you’ll see the framing techniques they used to hold that brick. And also, about the time these houses were built, oil was plentiful in our area for heating. Not saying those smaller chimneys were meant for wood or kerosene oil but we kept ourselves warm and we didn’t burn them down.
So, give NW Ohio a shot in heating and chimney googling.
SW Ohio is where I'm located. Right near KY. Not as much oil down here. At least, not underground.
One more thought on your sized chimney opening. Oil or natural gas heaters might not need the size chimney and certainly a wood stove commonly uses a 6” round flue.
How about some pictures?