The Stove Industry in 1892: Original "Working Paper," September 2006.

This is another of the old research notes that I wrote, principally for my own benefit, during the summer vacation of 2006, which I spent in gathering together lots of quantifiable information so that I could provide some scaffolding of facts in numerical form for the story of the stove industry that I was planning to put together.  My second research trip to the USA on stove-related business had been during the Easter vacation, so I knew that I could not look forward to another one until Spring or late Summer 2008, and decided to use my time at home to good effect, reading new stuff and making more sense of what I had already.

My attempts to import the text from the Google document in which it has been available via my old Stove History website have been defeated, so far, by Blogger's apparent inability to do so without completely screwing up the format.  So, for the moment, this post is just a placeholder and a collection of pointers:

• to the Google document itself;
• to the Google spreadsheet on which it's based; and 
• to the Google Map which provides another way of representing it, snapshotted below.

The Big Stove Is No More

This is what it takes to get me off my butt and do another bit for this poor old blog after eight silent months:

The Big Stove in its original location (after the World's Fair),
in the forecourt of the great Michigan Stove plant.

http://www.detnews.com/article/20110816/METRO/108160364/1409/Historic-stove-a-%E2%80%98total-loss%E2%80%99

Historic stove a 'total loss'

Official says lightning destroyed 15-ton icon at State Fairgrounds

Steve Pardo/ The Detroit News

Detroit — A historic stove, billed as the world's largest, is history following Saturday's lightning strike and fire at the former Michigan State Fairgrounds.

"I've been told today it's a total loss, that the fire just wiped it out," Kurt Weiss, spokesman for the Michigan Department of Technology Management and Budget, said Monday. "I don't know if it would even be possible to rebuild it. That's a bummer."

The 15-ton stove was painted to look like metal but it was made of wood and stood more than two stories high. It was built off a Garland model kitchen range in 1893 by the Michigan Stove Co. and stood proudly among regular stoves at the World's Fair in Chicago that year.

For years it sat on Belle Isle and was restored in 1998 and moved to the State Fairgrounds at Woodward and Eight Mile.

It remained at the 164-acre site, among dozens of structures. Falling attendance, aging infrastructure and state budget woes closed down the fair for good in 2009.

The Department of Technology, Management and Budget is responsible for the security of the property.

"What a shame to keep such an important piece of Detroit's history — and art, for that matter — hidden away," said Barbara Winckler, a former Detroiter who moved to Los Angeles in 1994.

The stove had special meaning for her and her family. Winckler said her great-grandfather, Charles C. Goddeeris, helped build the stove.

"It just breaks my heart," she said. "My mother would always tell us that Grandpa Chuck built that stove, whenever we would drive by it on Jefferson and the Belle Isle Bridge.

"I was so sad to see it moved to the State Fairgrounds, and then to find out that the fairgrounds have been closed to the public for years is just sad."

Security guards saw the stove get struck by lightning during a storm Saturday, Weiss said.

Detroit fire officials confirmed they were called out to the site around 8 p.m. Saturday.

The state has been looking to find another use for the property for the past two years, Weiss said.

spardo@detnews.com

There's one picture with that article -- several others with http://www.detnews.com/article/20110814/METRO/108140324/

The Big Stove in its final resting place

Another Stove Poem, a century later -- "A Plain Old Kitchen Chap"

This is from the Boston Globe for 19th April 1899, p. 6.  This title is available online via ProQuest, if you're lucky enough to have access to a university or public library that subscribes.  It's a bit long for me to transcribe in full, but this is the gist of it: it's a humorous poem about a retired farmer whose wife has done up the parlor with proceeds of chicken money:

...I've got no growl a-comin'; mother ain't let up on grub!
Still I'm wishin' she would let me have my smoke and take my nap
In the corner, side the woodbox; I'm a plain old kitchen chap."

"Land! If I could have a palace, wouldn't ask no better nook
Than this corner in the kitchen with my pipe and some good book.
I'm a sort of dull old codger, clear behind the times, I s'pose,
Stay at home and mind my bus'ness; wear some pretty rusty clothes,
'Druther set out here'n the kitchen: have for 40 years of more
Till the heel of that old rocker's gouged a hollow in the floor;
Set my boots behind the cook stove, dry my old blue woolen socks,
Get my knife and plug tobacker from that dented, old tin box,
Set and smoke and look at mother clearing up the things from tea;
-- Rather tame for city fellers, but that's good enough for me.

Holman F. Day, "Plain Old Kitchen Chap," from the Lewiston [Maine] Journal -- eventually gathered in his Up In Maine: Stories of Yankee Life Told In Verse (Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1904),  http://www.archive.org/stream/upinmainestorie01daygoog#page/n96/mode/2up.

You can even hear it recited in an appropriate accent by Charles Ross Taggart in a 1914 recording from http://www.archive.org/details/CharlesRossTaggart-PlainOldKitchenChap1914 

Now, what's the point of this?  OK, it's a nice piece of doggerel in what's evidently supposed to be Down-East vernacular, but it's also in its way an interesting commentary on the way that new technologies become old, and the focus of people's nostalgia changes.  As soon as stoves began to become common in the 1820s, Americans expressed an instant nostalgia for the open fireplace as the heart of the home, and cultural historians have taken the evidence of the resulting negative commentaries to prove that Americans' adoption of the new cooking and heating technology only proceeded in the face of significant resistance.  This is the heart of the argument of the late Patricia Brewer's From Fireplace to Cookstove: Technology and the Domestic Ideal in America (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2000), http://books.google.com/books?id=rV2GqiX5UioC

The materialist historian in me can't agree with that conclusion -- the evidence of the speed of adoption of stove technology is too overwhelming -- but that doesn't mean the nostalgia wasn't real in its own way, alongside the behavior.  By the end of the century, stoves were getting displaced -- by basement furnaces and steam heating -- so we see a different sort of nostalgia: now it's the stove itself that symbolizes the good old simpler days, becomes sentimentalized, as in this poem, and -- by the mid-20th century, when it's just a residual old technology in the homes of poorer and rural families -- it ends up as a valuable collectable.

One final literary point: there's a much more significant piece of Down-East, local-color writing from the end of the C19th that also makes its case about progress, nostalgia, and the different ways men and women responded.  The author is Sarah Orne Jewett, particularly in her stories "The Farm-House Kitchen" and "At Jake and Martin's," in her collection A Country Doctor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884), pp. 5-17 and 18-30.  They are widely available online, and offer a nice read. 

http://www.readbookonline.net/read/8869/21387/

http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/sarah-orne-jewett/a-country-doctor-hci/1-a-country-doctor-hci.shtml

http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/soj/acd/acd02.html

http://www.wattpad.com/17935-a-country-doctor-and-selected-stories-and-sketches

http://ia700304.us.archive.org/6/items/acountrydoctoran15294gut/15294-h/15294-h.htm -- the PROJECT GUTENBERG version