October 20, 2014
The Parlor Stove The controlled use of fire goes back millions of years. The first method was an open hearth. Many centuries passed before the first metal stove was invented. By the 1850s cast iron stoves for household use had become very popular. In Quincy, Illinois, stove manufacturing began in 1848. One of the first companies was the Comstock Stove Company. By 1868 the company was manufacturing 12,000 stoves per year. These included both parlor stoves for heating and kitchen stoves for cooking and heating. It is still in business today manufacturing restaurant-style stoves and other professional kitchen equipment. An article appeared in the Quincy Whig of November 6, 1869, describing the trials and tribulations of putting up the parlor stove for winter. Carl Sandburg doesn't mention putting up his family's parlor stove in his memoir, Always the Young Strangers. Perhaps it was just too painful to remember. The Whig article declared “The first step to be taken is to put on a very old and ragged coat, next the operator gets his hand inside the place where the pipe ought to go, blacks his fingers, and then carefully makes a black mark down the side of his nose. Having got his face properly marked, the victim is ready to begin the ceremony. “The head of the family grasps one side of the bottom of the stove, and his wife and the hired girl take hold of the other side. In this way, the load is started from the woodshed toward the parlor. “Having got the family comfort in place, the next thing is to find the legs. Two were left inside the stove since the spring before....The other two are usually found under the coal. Then the head of the family holds up one side of the stove while his wife puts two of the legs in place and next he holds up the other side while the other two are fixed and one of the first two falls out. “Then he goes for the pipe and gets two cinders in his eye. It doesn't make any difference how well the pipe was put up last year, it will always be found a little too short or a little two long. The head of the family jams his hat over his eyes and taking a pipe under each arm, goes to the tin shop to have it fixed. “Then he gets an old chair and climbs up the chimney again to find that, in cutting the pipe off, the end had been left too big for the hole in the chimney. “So he goes to the woodshed and splits one side of the pipe with an old ax, and squeezes it in his hands to make it smaller. “While getting the blocks under the legs, the pipe comes out of the chimney. That remedied, the elbow keeps tipping over, to the great alarm of his wife. Head of the family get the dinner table out, puts a chair on it, gets his wife to hold the chair, and balances himself on it to drive some nails in the ceiling. Drops the hammer on his wife's head. At last the nails driven, makes a wire swing to hold the pipe, hammers a little more, pulls a little there, takes a deep breath and announces the ceremony completed. “Job never put up any stove. It would have ruined his reputation if he had.”
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