Guide to the “Stoves” Webspace

This area will remain subject to reconstruction for years, at least until I manage to write a book about this topic; and even then there will be stuff left over, and material best presented this way rather than in print. If you come across this material by chance or Google, you are welcome to read it; but if you wish to cite anything, please check with me and get permission first.

(A) Research Jottings

This is where I have parked material that I wrote as I was getting to know my own data – rough notes towards eventual ‘proper’ publications, some of which have now occurred.  It will probably be a bit dry and technical, but not without interest to the discerning reader.

• The Stove Industry in 1874 – a statistical portrait.  This is also a place where you can track the names and locations of manufacturers of old stoves in which you may have an interest as a collector.  See also The Stove Industry in 1892 – the same, but different.
  Update August 2012: The Internet Archive has recently posted what is probably the oldest surviving list of US stove manufacturers, compiled by members of the industry themselves – see A Report of the Proceedings of the First Semi-Annual Meeting Held by the National Association of Stove Manufacturers of the United States, July 10 and 11, 1872 (Albany: Weed, Parsons & Co., 1872), http://archive.org/stream/reportofproceedi01nati#page/69/mode/1up for the first page of the list.
• The Naming of Stoves – one way of tracing who made an old stove is by its name.  This is a list of 850 models of stoves manufactured in the industry’s leading production centers, Albany and Troy, New York, in 1875.  Old stove names have a certain charm. [Aug. 2012: see also http://stovehistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/back-again-naming-of-stoves.html and https://sites.google.com/site/stovehistorystuff/home/the-naming-of-stoves -- which is where I am moving my stove history stuff from this now-dead website.]
• Stoves & Patents – very detailed, about the involvement of the stove industry with the US patent system, through 1873 – lots of tables, charts, and numbers, and links to online patent documents to illustrate it, when I get around to adding them... Update August 2012: The work this started has since begun to see the light of day, most noticeably in “’The Stove Trade Needs Change Continually.’”
• The Albany and Troy Stove Industries, 1808-1936 – an exhaustive account of the growth and decline of the stove industry in its key mid C19th center.
• “Making and Selling the First Universal Consumer Durables: The Cast-Iron Stove Industry in Victorian America,” Seminar Paper, Hagley Museum and Library, 12 April 2007.

Work in Print & in the Pipeline: Articles About Stoves & the Industry

• “Conquering Winter: U.S. Consumers and the Cast-Iron Stove,” July 2008 –only freely accessible if you have access to a subscribing library.
• “Inventing the U.S. Stove Industry, c. 1815-1875: Making and Selling the First Universal Consumer Durable,” March 2009 – http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0007680500063170 for the publishers’ official version.
• “’The Stove Trade Needs Change Continually’: Designing the First Mass-Market Consumer Durable, ca. 1830-1900,” April 2008 – a revised version was published with a slightly different title (dates 1810-1930) in the Winterthur Portfolio, Winter 2009 -- http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/648372.
• “What Price Competition? Cooperative Associationalism in the U.S. Stove Industry, c. 1870-1925” – March 2009 [early draft; under review].

(B) Old Stoves Online: Good Web Links

Good places to start (apart from here, of course), are:

Melita Podesta’s “Material Life: 1810s Family” [2004] gives a nice feel of the pre-stove domestic world.

Old Sturbridge Village’s stove collections – follow sidebar links Collections – Online Database, and search for “Stove” or click to browse “Foodways” under “Cooking.”  Browsing has the advantage of starting with pre-stove hollow ware (kettles, saucepans, etc.), and excellent multi-directional views of classic early C19th New England kitchen stoves begin on p. 2.

Harvard University has a very fine collection of old stove catalogues, for anybody lucky enough to be within commuting distance (and to have a library card!). For the rest of us, they have been good enough to digitize a nice spread of catalogues from the mid-1850s onwards, which complement the materials in the Duke collection (below):

• http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2839128 – Rathbone & Kennedy, Albany, NY – Circular, 1854
• http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2839219 – Potter & Co., Troy, NY -- Circular, 1861

· http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7314324 – Smith & Anthony Stove Co., Boston – Furnace Catalogue, 1887

· http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/3826986 – Phillips & Clark Stove Co., Geneva, NY -- Catalogue of Andes Stoves & Ranges, 1904

· http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2845797 – Henry N. Clark Co. Range Catalogue, Boston, 1908-9

· http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2845950 – Henry N. Clark Co. Stove Catalogue, Boston, 1911

· http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2845291 – White-Warner Co., Taunton, MA – Quaker Stove Catalogue, 1926

[Update August 2012: The above few links have now been added to with loads more pointers to online versions of stove inventors’ and manufacturers’ pamphlets and catalogues, https://sites.google.com/site/stovehistorystuff/home/stove-catalogues-etc]

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site takes you to the one surviving example of the kind of place where early American stoves were made, before the decisive move in the 1830s from direct casting in open sand at the rural blast furnace to flask casting in closed molds in the urban foundry remelting pig iron in a cupola furnace.  They used to have some nice pictures of the 10-plate stoves manufactured there, but I couldn’t find them again last time I looked.  However, as a bonus, searching the whole National Park Service site produces hundreds of nice images of stoves in situ. Other good Pennsylvania sites include those for the Cornwall [another site:] and Joanna furnaces, both of them major stove producers in the late C18th-early C19th, and of course the Iron Furnace Sourcebook. Other stove-producing furnaces existed in nearby states, e.g. Batsto in New Jersey.

The Albany Institute of History & Art has an unparalleled collection of early- to mid-C19th stoves manufactured in the surrounding area, but unfortunately it only shows one on its website.

American Memory at the Library of Congress is of course terrific.  Probably the most useful collections for stove nuts are the vast image libraries (see below; in all cases, the simple search term “stove” will generate as many hits as you want), of which one of the best is:

· The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920 which may whet your whistle for a visit to the home site at Duke.  If you go there, you will find:

· “Cooking Stoves” (1873), a very texty local dealer’s flier

· “Stoves! Stoves”(an 1874 advertising handbill)

[P.S. For some reason, this looks like rubbish now in Firefox from here through the end of the document, everything underlined, but it’s OK in IE still, except that it seems as if the hyperlinks have all slipped; don’t know about Chrome]

· The New Golden Harvest Wood Stove, 1890.

· The ‘New Process’ Wick Oil Cookstove Cookbook, c. 1910.

· The Michigan Stove Co.’s Cupid at Home in the Kitchen, c. 1910.

· The Avondale Stove & Foundry Co.’s Catalogue for July 1913.

· Favorite Stove Co. Puzzle Cards

· The “New Lee” Cooking Stoves & Ranges flier

· “I Say Snowflake” – a politically-incorrect advertisement for stove polish.

· The J.W. Thompson Blue Book on Advertising, 1906 – how to sell X-Ray Stove Polish

· Gilbert P. Farrar’s The Typography of Advertisements That Pay (1917) for Bussey & McLeod (of Troy)’s Gold Coin stoves and ranges, but I haven’t checked which page yet; and

· S. Roland Hall’s The Advertising Handbook (1921), for the Kalamazoo Stove Co.

Bussey & McLeod and Kalamazoo are both interesting because by the early C20th they engaged in direct marketing to final consumers, bypassing wholesale and retail dealers.  This entailed heavy advertising and the establishment of a clear brand-name identity – Kalamazoo’s slogan “Kalamazoo Direct to You” has entered at least Kalamazoo folklore, and allowed mid-sized, small-town firms to compete in national markets.

· There’s also a particularly good quality 1920 ad for a Buck’s Sanitary Porcelain Enamel Combination Range at Leo Klein’s “Red Scare (1918-1921” image database, though I have no idea why, or why the ad shows a Chinese cook.  However, it’s a terrific example of how the stove industry’s major players competed for a declining market by the early 1920s – with lots of advertising, and a new aesthetic: only the stove’s curly Chippendale (?) legs hark back to the object’s origins; everything else is clean, bright, modern.  The stove has even paid its respects to competitive fuels, by incorporating them – this stove had a gas hotplate, an increasingly common feature from the C19th on.

The message of this site, and of the material to be found on eBay™ (see below), is clear: the stove industry played a significant part in the emergence of advertising and marketing in the United States.

Library of Congress American Memory Picture Resources:

· Historic American Buildings and Historic American Engineering Record, for some old stove foundries, stoves in situ, and even late C18th stove patterns.

· Architecture & Interior Design for C20th America, the Gottscho and Schleissner collection, for more in situ pictures (focusing on upper-class residences).

· The Chicago Daily News collection, 1902-1933, for lots of photographs of stoves in ordinary domestic and other settings.

· The wonderful Farm Security Administration collections, 1935-1945.  Despite the late date, these actually show old (and some new) domestic technologies for cooking and heating, because poor and/or rural Americans were the last to be able to access replacements for solid fuel appliances.

· The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920 were very cold in winter, and not overendowed with wood for fuel.  They offered a great market for stoves, pictures of which (and the stores in which they were sold) fill this site.

· Prairie Settlement: Nebraska Photographs and Family Letters 1862-1912 is similarly rewarding, as is

· Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982.  If only the guys on Brokeback Mountain had had a good stove with them, they would have been able to keep warm without getting into so much trouble.

· Turn-of-the-Century America: the Detroit Publishing Co. collection, including the insides of some stove factories and stores – understandably, because by that time Detroit had become the stove capital of the U.S.

· Washington As It Was: the Theodor Horydczak collection, 1923-1959 is excellent for its images of an urban population adapting to electric cooking.

· History of the American West 1860-1920 is a very rich source for the same reason as the above Great Plains, Nebraska, and Nevada collections – for rural Americans, in particular, the solid-fuel stove was the key domestic technology, and the only one available to them where networked fuel supplies (gas, electric) remained hard to acquire well into the C20th.  Finally,

· Finally, the Panoramic Maps Collection provides detailed images of many of the C19th communities where stove manufacturing was carried on.  The views generally include a key, so that one can identify stove works and their relation to (e.g.) transport links – rivers, railroads.  Albany and Troy, NY and Royersford, PA, have particularly nice images.

Another very fine set of images is presented by the US Patent & Trademark Office, which stores literally tens of thousands of pictures of stove patents including many survivors from before the Great Fire of 1836.  Unfortunately, its site is very difficult to search for C19th material unless you know precisely what you are looking for, and enter the number correctly (post-1836 patents for invention only need their number; pre-1836 patents have to start with an X, which is a bit confusing as in paper sources you’ll find them as e.g. 1987X – you enter that as X1987; design patents start with a D and reissued patents start with RE).  The best way to do this, if you are lucky enough to have access to a subscribing library, is to use Paratext’s 19^th Century Masterfile™, which includes among other wonderful things the Subject Index to US Patents, 1790-1873.  The great thing about the Paratext collection is that your search results will include ‘hot links’ to (stable URLs for) the US PTO’s patent document images.

There’s another problem with the PTO website, in that it only provides images in TIFF format, which requires you to have a particular kind of plugin on your browser, which you can get free from Alternatiff.  You can get much (but not all: only post-1836; only patents for invention, not design, and no reissues, as far as I can make out) of the same material easier from the European Patent Office – enter US patent numbers as e.g. US31270 and you will get J.C. Treadwell’s 29 Jan. 1861 Grate Patent in a handy PDF format.

Google has transformed access to the PTO database by making it accessible as JPEGs as well as downloadable PDFs and by having the whole thing word-searchable.  There are far too many stove (and related) patents for a crude word-search to produce a manageable number of hits, but if you know what you’re looking for, you can probably find it there now. Google provides a link back to the USPTO site, so if you find something interesting and would like a high-quality (300 dpi) TIFF version of it rather than a 96 dpi JPEG or PDF, then you can get this easily.

(C) Commercial and Collectors’ Sites:

• The Good Time Stove Co., Goshen, MA is a commercial site run by obvious enthusiasts, with a wonderful picture gallery as well as an online saleroom. They also have a YouTube introductory video – quite charming.
• The Antique Stoves Association provides links to other stove stores, as well as some of those I have listed here.
• The Antique Stove Hospital -- another excellent site.
• Antique Stoves.com – also includes a good History page with masses of picture links, and now an excellent pre-1890s stock guide.
• The Barnstable Stove Shop -- a very good collection.
• Canadians, i.e. the inhabitants of Upper and Lower Canada (Ontario and Quebec) and the Maritime Provinces, took to stoves even before those in the north-eastern United States (even more bitter winters, the French tradition), and developed their own industry too – so now they have their own fine site, for Canadian Antique Stoves.
• The Keokuk Stove Works – major midwestern restorers – are also worth a look – a very lively site.
• Shaker Brook Farm’s Antique Pressing Iron Museum – for more good links to collectors’ sites.
• Stove Parts Plus – an answer to the problem of securing replacement parts for old stoves.
• Classic Advertisements – Household Appliances – mostly C20th, and therefore about challengers and successors to the cast-iron, solid-fueled stove – gas, kerosene, fuel oil, and electric, and central heating.
• Advertising Educational Foundation -- Daniel D. Hill, Advertising to the American Woman 1900-1999, Ch. 3, “Home, Hearth, and Housekeeping” – all C20th.
• Finally, eBay™ is a surprisingly good (but, like the stove store sites, dynamic – i.e. you can’t be sure that something good will stay there long) site, because the stove industry produced masses of collectables – not just stoves themselves, but trade cards, catalogues, and advertising gimmicks.  Search “stove trade” or “stove industry” rather than “stove” in order to screen out the hardware, and include eBay Stores sellers within your search.  The material on sale at any time rivals the collections of museums with a keen interest in stove stuff, e.g. the Albany Institute (above) and the Rensselaer County Historical Museum in Troy, NY.

Howell Harris, March 2009 [updated August 2012]