I think it was one day at breakfast my dad remarked that the sound of the furnace clicking on down in the basement was one of the most satisfying things he’d ever heard.

When we lived out on the farm, we had a coal-fired, hot-air furnace, and when we moved to the house my great-grandparents built on North Adams Street just outside Oswego, that, too, had a coal-fired furnace. The only difference was that it was a hot water system with radiators that proved delightful places to sit on frigid winter days.

My dad always got his coal from the Brown Coal Company, whose office was on Lincoln Avenue in Aurora. Their brown dump trucks delivered coal out on the farm and in Oswego when we moved there. Their brown trucks always were staffed by Black men.

The company’s slogan, painted on their trucks, “Our Name is Brown, Our Coal is Black, We Treat You White,” fascinated me from the time I learned to read it. I asked by parents what it meant to “treat someone White,” and got the uncomfortable answer that it meant treating them nicely. Which, naturally, led to wondering how we were supposed to treat the nice guys who drove Brown’s trucks. That, however, is a topic for another day.

Back to the coal those trucks delivered. Coal delivery day was pretty hectic because my mother and sisters had to stuff rags into every possible nook or cranny where coal dust could escape when it was dumped into the basement coal bin. And, of course, there always were one or two cracks missed, meaning greasy black coal dust made its way where it shouldn’t have.

Shoveling coal into the furnace down in the basement was a young man’s game, a healthy young man at that, and my dad was neither young nor healthy. So within a year or so of moving into town, he had the furnace modified to burn fuel oil. The old coal bin was cleaned out and a large steel oil tank was muscled down into the basement. Dad chiseled a hole through the foundation for the filler pipe so it could be filled by the guy driving the fuel oil truck. And so my dad’s satisfied remark about listening to the furnace kick on during those cold winter mornings in the 1950s and early 1960s.

It was only a couple of years later that the Northern Illinois Gas Company ran natural gas lines down North Adams Street, and we had the fun of muscling that oil tank up out of the basement. So in just a few years, my family went from heating with coal to heating with fuel oil to heating with natural gas.

The effects of that change, which were taking place throughout the community, could be seen in the gradual disappearance of the big piles of coal across the railroad tracks from the Oswego Grain Elevator just off Route 34. Those big coal piles had been a community fixture as long as most people could remember, but they disappeared within a few years.

Coal had powered Illinois’ growth starting in the early 19th century when deposits in the Mississippi River bluffs opposite St. Louis were first exploited. In fact, John Reynolds, an early governor of Illinois, helped promote one of the first railroads west of the Alleghenies to boost coal production. The line’s cars were horse-drawn over 6 miles of wooden rails to Illinoistown (now East St. Louis), where the coal was loaded on boats and shipped across the river to St. Louis and then down the Mississippi. Not to mention the first macadam road in the state, from Belleville to the Illinoistown ferry, was built to accommodate heavy coal wagon traffic.

French explorers discovered coal in the Illinois River Valley in the 17th century, but those deposits weren’t exploited for another two centuries when the switch to steam engines from waterpower was well underway. Illinois coal quickly became a necessity to power factories, manufacture steel in places such as Joliet, stoke railroad and threshing machine engines, and heat homes. It was also a major Illinois export.

Railroads made excess profits by overcharging coal customers, and coal mining unions went on strike for better working conditions in what was an extremely dangerous work environment. In February 1883, for instance, 70 men and boys – some as young as 13 – were killed in the Grundy County Diamond Mine disaster.

Coal also was baked in ovens to create manufactured gas. Aurora-based Western United Gas and Electric Company piped coal gas to communities as far west as Sandwich by 1913, and north up the Fox Valley for residential and commercial heating, lighting and cooking.

Even then, however, coal’s days were numbered. People preferred gas for cooking, heating, and electricity for lighting as soon as they could get it. Natural gas pipelines were extended from Texas to northern Illinois just as World War II began, halting work. But after the war, natural gas quickly replaced Western United’s manufactured gas, and the company became Northern Illinois Gas Company, the ancestor of today’s NiGas.

The last major coal users, besides the steel and chemical industries, were power plant operators. But in the 21st century, solar and wind power have become increasingly economical, gradually outpacing coal’s economics. Former President Donald Trump was elected promising to “bring coal back,” but its use has continued to decline, dropping by nearly 32% during his term in office. According to Bloomberg, about twice as many people are at work producing solar power as are mining coal these days.

When we were kids, we were threatened that if we weren’t good, we’d get coal in our Christmas stockings instead of candy and toys. These days, I’m not even sure where a person would go to find coal to put in someone’s stocking, or anywhere else, for that matter. Sure, you can order it on Amazon.com (25 lbs. for $35), but those giant piles of the stuff down at the elevator, hauled in by rail car, are long gone.

As, I’m happy to say, is the prospect of waking up on a cold winter morning and stoking the furnace down in the basement.

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