Saturday, September 1, 2012

A Range of Stoves

This week's Sepia Saturday prompt shows a country store interior with a pot-bellied stove. In addition to heating, people also used wood-fired stoves for cooking. Sometimes they were simple and other times they were extremely ornate.

Garland stoves have been around for a long time. In fact I remember considering one when I was shopping for ranges years ago. As far as I know, Garland only produces commercial ranges now.

This is one of my favorite advertising cards, although it's difficult to show with scanned images.
It starts out as a triangle like this.
 And then unfolds to find the children doing unspeakable things. The maid runs to alert their mother.


When she come back with the mother, the children are sweetly reading their books by the fire. But where is the cat?


In any case, it's an amazing stove. Not surprisingly, people still collect these even if they don't use them for heat. 

The Michigan Stove Co. had been making Garland stoves had been around since 1864, but they were originally unveiled at the 1893 World's Fair. In 1925 The Michigan Stove Co. merged with Detroit Stove Works, makers of "Jewel" Stoves and Ranges. Here's a trade card of theirs showing no stoves at all, but a blissed out girl on a shopping trip. She looks to me as if she's waiting for a train.

 

The Jewell stove name may be in quotation marks to distinguish it from another company, makers of the Jewett Range.



Sherman S. Jewett (1818-1897) was better known for his civic involvement and philanthropy than his stove business. You can read more about him here.

Be sure to check out Sepia Saturday this week, with many posts inspired by a single photograph.

26 comments:

  1. What a funny little advertising card. I'm sure today the company would be sued as soon as a real kid put a real cat in a stove.

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  2. I almost went with the stove for today, but didn't, so I'm glad someone did! Interesting advertising cards!

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  3. This week's photographic prompt was so busy, but I would never have thought of choosing Stoves as a theme. I love old advertisements - they are so picturesque and you featured some wonderful examples here.

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  4. That's a cool card, but I don't like thinking about what happened to the cat.

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  5. Really shows how advertising has changed (or maybe not) :)

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  6. Reading this post it made me wonder when people started advertising rather than waiting for someone entering your shop. Anyway, these advertisements are beautiful. Thanks for sharing.

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  7. What a great collection! Those kids were mean; and then they turned around to act like angels. It is always the case.

    I enjoyed your post very much,

    Kathy M.

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  8. Hi Christine,
    It was so awesome to hear from you on my blog the other day! Thank you for stopping by and leaving such nice things to hear. My world has been crazy busy lately, hope you have been doing well too, my friend!!! (and still enjoying the earrings)
    Christine

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  9. I can't stop worrying about the cat!
    Barbara

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  10. Great ad cards! The cat thing IS a little disturbing. Can't imagine when "humor" like that worked on any level...unless one hates cats. I particularly like the design on the back of the one card. Seems like each line is a different font!

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  11. You have some wonderful old cards, Christine.

    Somehow, I keep hoping there's another side to the advertising card that shows the cat alive - perhaps on top of a high cupboard or some other safe place! (But there can't be because you've shown all sides of the card. Gruesome advertising illustration.

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  12. Like Nancy I was waiting for the true story to be revealed. I'll be generous and say the children were teasing the maid.

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  13. Wonderful! Childhood was very different in the olden days. Wicked children indeed! I liked reading the directions. Who would remember now that coal was measured by the size of a chestnut?

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  14. It's funny how interesting and colorful the ads were then, today not so much. Even some ads today make me stop to figure out what they are even trying to sell. Funny how things have changed so .....

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  15. These are really quite wonderful when you think of the amount of work by so many people that went in to producing these. These days someone grabs a stock photo from online, sets some type on their computer, then uploads the whole thing to an ftp site, and in a few days the mailers are on their way. Something is surely lacking today.

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  16. Other than the theme - these are beautiful. I am hard pressed to see how the advertiser thought that connecting the stove with psychopaths would sell the product...

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  17. Like the design of the central heating system.

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  18. I love how suspicious the dog looks in the top image!

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  19. The stoves are magnificent and enormous. I can't help wondering how they managed to install them. It stops me thinking about the cat.

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  20. I'm afraid that pot bellied stoves remind me of the smell of coke inside an army barracks in winter.
    Interesting adverts for stoves; somehow I think that the cat would have been to clever to be shut inside the stove. Hopefully the shildren had scratches to prove it.

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  21. The 'Base Burners' label appears quite appropriate for those children, they seem well versed in the ways of animal sacrifice, with the cat tied to a block and held down by a fork... On the lighter side, I have very fond childhood memories of Christmas Eves at my grandparents house, where my grandmother would prepare a traditional Czech/Slovak holiday meal on a big stove similar (but less fancy) to the one on the Jewett card- I liked being allowed to open the firebox door and add more wood to the fire under her direction as she stirred, flipped, fried, etc. And the meal was always wonderful, I have no idea how she could do all that on such a 'low-tech' stove.

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  22. Wow! What an interesting card. They should have put "No animals were hurt during the making of this card". HA.

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  23. Just awesome. That's back when a stove was a stove!

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  24. What wonderfully ornate stoves. Must have been nice to have a room with a Garland stove in the middle of winter, as long at the cat didn't complain.

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  25. Interesting adverts and decorated stoves. I hope the cat didn't come to grief :-) Jo

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  26. Interesting stove, but the [failed] humor in their advertisement is in bad taste, in MY opinion. No way this would go though nowadays... The mentalities sure have changed, thankfully...
    :/~
    HUGZ

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