“Guess what? From the 1700’s well into the 1900’s, everyone heated with either wood or coal......”
Sure did, my mom cooked many a meal on a wood burning stove when we lived up in the Umatilla National forest, dad manned a tower and fought fires. We eventually moved to Weston Ore and the event in the article would happen there every year during the winter. When you came through the pass dropping into town it was covered in a smoky haze. Other than a constant smell of smoke we never paid much attention to it. Health wise it didn’t seem to bother us either, all of us kids are well over 60, mom passed at 87 and dad turns 94 this September.
During that time describe wood was the only source of energy, we cooked with it, heated with it and built with it. A community would be established and the available wood would immediately start to get farther and farther from town. Wood haulers would travel quite a ways from town to cut and haul back to town until that source was gone and them go find another. Wood was consumed at an astounding rate. Thank God we discovered oil, gas and coal!
As wood was used for everything in the mid-1800’s, pictures from then seem to show that the eastern US is 10x more forested now than it was then.......in general, Civil War pics show a denuded land.