A couple of weeks ago [24 April 2018], a member of the Antique Stove Collectors' Facebook Group posted about a stove he had found in a ditch in Port Royal, VA. It was made by (or for) a Baltimore firm I had never heard of, Conklin & Willis, but its name and iconography were, to say the least, immediately arresting. Four years after the end of the Civil War, and in a state that had remained in the Union, Conklin & Willis were patenting, making, and selling a stove they called the "Stonewall," marked with the arms of the state of Virginia, and embellished with a medallion showing one person in classical dress standing over the dead body of another, and still carrying the unsheathed sword used for the murder. This image is accompanied by the slogan "Sic semper tyrannis," and is a version of the seal and official motto of the Commonwealth of Virginia adopted in 1776. But these words had more recent connotations too -- they figured in the pro-Confederate song "Maryland, My Maryland," popular with secessionists and pro-Southerners in Maryland during the Civil War, and now the state's official song, and they were shouted out aloud by John Wilkes Booth in Ford's Theater on 14 April 1865, just after he had shot President Abraham Lincoln. This otherwise unremarkable old cooking stove certainly bore its bitter heart on its sleeve.
Who made this stove? Daniel E. Conklin was the designer, taking out Design Patent 3532 in June 1869. He was a partner in the firm of Baltimore stove merchants Conklin & Willis, and went on to a long and successful business career in Baltimore, notably as a hardware importer and merchant, but apart from that I can find out little about him. His patent was assigned to (purchased by) the partnership, then including John H. Harbeck 1st, another merchant, who also served as one of the witnesses, alongside Joseph T. Atkinson, a notary public, and A.B. Dishman, who went on to a career including more stove invention. Z.L.C. Willis, Conklin's partner and another of the assignees, is the only of the men involved with this patent whose biography seems to have a bearing on this distinctive design: he had been a Captain in the Virginia Artillery during the recent War.
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