Volume 6 , Issue 31

Old Home Comfort Stove Story

"My name is Frances (Fran) Robinson. I found your site while looking for The Wrought Iron Range Company. So far I have only located cookbooks. Three on e-bay and yours. I really want a parts list and address to order parts.

You ask for a story so this is mine... My daddy bought the stove for $50.00 and a milk calf. I think the year was 1948. We lived on a ranch on Toenail Trail, seventeen miles east of Eldorado, Texas. I was nine years old. Many cold mornings my younger sister, brother and I warmed our back sides with the oven door open. My mother and daddy would use the oven door as a table, drag up the cane bottom chairs (they were not cane anymore, they were covered with deer hides) and drink their coffee before we woke up to catch the school bus. The stove is mostly white enamel with some spotted black enamel. For a wood burning stove, that was very rare in those days. It has a five gallon copper water reservoir, a warming closet and because it was 'white' it always looked so clean. One early morning my daddy was getting clean clothes from a bedroom closet. He was using a match for a light and caught a wool skirt on fire. They threw hot water from the reservoir believing the steam help put out the fire, the house was saved. My mother said she was so afraid she would lose her new stove.

My mother once recalled how she cooked biscuits in the oven with the door open. In 1963 it was moved to the ranch-hands house and later to a back-pasture house. Then after my daddy's death in 1986 my brother took it from the ranch, and after my brothers death this year, I brought it to my house. The past seventeen years it has sit in a pasture uncovered on some boards that roted and the legs were in the ground. The iron top is very rusty, but is cleaning nicely. Some of the iron in the fire-box set in water till it evaporated causing it to be in very bad shape. All the installation has rioted, it is probably asbestos anyway. I am hoping enough is good so I can use it on the patio. There is only three of these stoves in this part of the country. My mother and daddy had one, my grandmother had one, and the neighboring ranch had one. They beleived this to be very special. Thanks Linda for reading my e-mail. Please let me hear from you." -- Fran Robinson 2rr@cox.net
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