A 20th century feature that might be confused with the burn barrel in my
"backyard" might be the cinder block or concrete block construction used to
smoke eels, a past-time with important ecological and historical history (as
in William Sydney Mount's painting of "Eel  Fishing in Setauket" in which a
small white child and a woman of African American heritage is shown with the
woman standing in the boat (my Canadian granduncle Garfield's tombstone
depicts him standing rowing a dory full of lobster traps) with an eel spear
the child huddled in the bow.

William Sydney Mount was the foremost "American genre" painter of his time
(illustrating state monies, etc.) and was one of the first to portray African
Americans in oil. His paintings can be seen at the Museums at Stony Brook,
Stony Brook, NY (once the only stop in Michelin Travel Guides for Europeans
on Long Island listed) and in a monumental work by Mr. Frankenstein, I kid
you not.

So the features seen may or not perhaps relate to garbage burning in some
cases but to the smoking of fish or perhaps sausage, a tradition related to
me from the Baltic countries of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia perhaps. I have
only the experince however from my "backyard" the "new Village" founded by
those from Setauket, Long Island, NY.

George Myers