The Albany & Troy Stove Industry, from Start to Finish: 1808-1936 (September 2006)

 

The Albany & Troy Stove Industry, From Start to Finish: 1808-1936

Number of active firms per year -- data from this spreadsheet.

I have been trying to add the text from this old research note (dating from September 2006) in my effort to bring all of my stove-related material into one place rather than spreading it between this blog and my old Stove History website, but Blogger doesn't want to cooperate -- everything copied and pasted in from Google Docs seems to bugger up the formatting and produce error messages.  So I will satisfy myself with this placeholder for now.  

The above chart summarizes the story: two periods of very rapid growth in the number of active stove-making and -wholesaling firms, the first after the completion of the Erie Canal, the second after the recovery from the economic uncertainties of decade between the end of the early Jacksonian boom and the Mexican War; then overall stability, punctuated by crises before and after the Civil War; then, from about 1880, a slow decline as the stove industry and its market shifted South and West, and that market was eroded by new fuels and technologies (gasoline and kerosene, manufactured and natural gas, for cooking and some heating; oil for domestic heating; and electricity).

This particular research note came at the end of a summer of compiling as much quantifiable data as I could find in order to go beyond anecdotes in setting out an overall framework for my research on writing on the history of the stove industry and its products -- in this case, using its principal manufacturing centre from the 1830s through the 1880s as a rough proxy for the nation as a whole.