St. Louis has a rich industrial history, going well beyond beer, brick, lead and iron. It’s also home to a robust hot stove league, picking the bones in between baseball seasons. Here’s a more literal take.
A diverse intersection
This essay relates to a photograph I recently saw. It’s from the Streets and Sewers collection of the St. Louis Public Library. This photo was taken at the intersection of Chouteau and Jefferson Avenues, looking north, sometime in the 1920s or early 30s. It manages to capture, in a single shot, the long evolution of city transportation, from horse and wagon to trolley to automobile. Interesting era, in that all three found a way to share the same road.
Prominent on the right is the marquis for the O.K. Harry Steel Company. In smaller lettering, it advertises, “Fencing,” “Portable Bldg’s,” “Steel Roofing” and “Steel Tanks.”
Owen Keif Harry (1852 – 1915) was a Texan who established O.K. Harry Steel in Dallas in 1880. Owen held patents for awning brackets, storm cellar doors, boilers, and various aspects of building construction. His daughter, Mrs. French Nelson, lived in St. Louis. The family established a branch here, as shown in the picture, at 2333 Papin Street.
Jefferson Avenue became a viaduct at Chouteau, crossing over the Mill Creek Valley. If you veer a bit to the right here, you’ll see an advertisement for Buck Stoves and Ranges on the side of the building to the right.
An early history of house stoves
In 1922, Buck’s Stoves and Ranges factory was at 3500 N.2nd Street. It could be that advertising on Chouteau Avenue attempted to counter the nearness of the American Stove Company headquarters, at Chouteau and 8th Street.
Buck’s Stove and Range Co began in 1846. The photo to the left is of a parlor stove from the St. Stanislaus Jesuit Seminary in Florissant. The first stoves were designed as early space heaters, not ovens.
The earliest Americans cooked over open fires, with hearths and trivets and big suspended pots. In terms of heating a room, fireplaces are inefficient at best. Built into a wall, they send their heat mostly up, rather than out. The first stoves were really furnaces. From the center of a room, they could heat the space radially. The iron used in them held and released heat more gently than an open flame. The classic image of cooking something on a parlor stove was the pot of coffee in the sheriff’s office, as seen in old western films.
Jonathan Hathaway won a patent in 1837 for a firebox with four boiler holes on the top surface. Downdraft flues heated one large or two small ovens, with a single damper controlling air flow, and thus heat, into the firebox. Hathaway sold stoves and licensed others around New York, Pennsylvania and into Canada.
When he renewed his patent nine years later, it featured a single large oven with a drop down door. And so it has been.
As he relocated frequently, Hathaway required fixed local partners, and in the summer of 1838, hired Darius Buck, a wagon maker, as a partner. Buck set out to “break down the Hathaway patent and get an improvement on said model. If they could get the improvement patented, it would (outcompete) the Hathaway stove.”
Enter Darius Buck
Darius Buck was born a New Yorker in 1801. By 1840, he held only two patents. He did, however, make an outsize contribution to stove design, innovating with the large rectangular design so familiar today. Buck was a determined exploiter of the intellectual property in his patents. It enabled him to profit from anything resembling the design everyone then built upon. He kept his legal team busy.
Well, what’s good for the goose…Hathaway saw some early Buck stoves for sale, and notified his employee of patent infringement. Admitting to it, Buck volunteered to pay royalties and move to another territory. Hathaway refused the offer, but Buck relocated anyway, pursued by Hathaway’s lawyers. They played legal whack-a-mole further west, until Buck ended up in St. Louis, as far as possible from his mentor and rival.
With neither the capital nor skill to manufacture, Buck’s stoves were made by contract in Cincinnati and shipped to St Louis. His own strength was in sales. By 1844, his ads boasted “the most perfect article in the Western country.”
He began limited manufacturing with a local tinsmith and experimented with various designs in the late 1840s. Like Hathaway, Buck kept up a steady stream of litigation, suing others freely for infringement of his patents. Seems like an ironic move for this admitted patent copier.
Buck died in the mid-1850s and his son Charles replaced him. Darius Buck’s widow renewed the original patent until 1860. The firm grew rapidly until the offices and foundry occupied an entire city block. Buck Stoves had acquired a national presence.
His transformation in less than a decade from patent violator and fugitive from Hathaway to a successful St. Louis business baron. Darius Buck helped develop the standard cooking stove of mid-19th century America. It was a hot selling item indeed.
The Charter Oak stove takes over
After the Buck patent expired, Giles Filley of St. Louis began the Excelsior Stove Works. His family’s capital enabled the company to grow rapidly, with 25 molders producing 60 stoves per day. In 1849, as the city recovered from catastrophic bouts of cholera and fire, the discovery of gold in California caused an enormous wave of emigration that surged past his door. Excelsior made 6,000 stoves in its first year, and quadrupled that within the next few years.
The Excelsior Charter Oak design, beyond function into high home fashion, launched in 1851 and patented through 1874. It was the best selling stove in the country. Production stopped only for the Civil War, during which Excelsior’s foundry made cannons and armor plating for James Eads’s Union gunboats. The company enjoyed robust sales into the 1920’s.
Leading up to Magic Chef
The American Stove Company had roots going back to the 1850’s. It was led by Charles Stockstrom and by 1881, specialized in manufacturing kitchen stoves. The company created the Magic Chef brand in 1921, to capitalize on its 1914 invention of a thermal control device. This regulated the flow of gas to the stove, and proved an immediate hit.
Magic Chef sold to MC Appliance in 1997, but had a long and distinguished run. Its old headquarters remain at Kingshighway and I-44, as a multistory U-Haul facility. You can tour the pretty fabulous mansion of Charles Stockstrom in St. Louis. Typically, tours are the first Saturday of each month Details at http://magicchefmansion.com/tours/.
Buck stoves, by the way, are still made today – in North Carolina. It’s much more about the aesthetics of a fireplace than a working cookstove.
Typical old St. Louis industrial history. You can pick a topic and often find yourself in pretty deep. In 1878, the city boasted thirteen stove makers. Say, thirteen is what is called “a baker’s dozen.” St. Louis was cookin’!
Resources
Primary source is from materials for an unwritten book by Howell Harris of the UK;
http://stovehistory.blogspot.com/2015/01/darius-buck-and-invention-of-large-oven.html January 28 2015.
History of Magic Chef from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Chef
Photo of Chouteau Avenue at Jefferson from the Dick Lemen Collection of Streets and Sewers, taken between about 1920 and 1940.
Some information about the Excelsior Stove Company came from The Civil War In Missouri; Missouri History Museum; 2011. http://www.civilwarmo.org/educators/resources/info-sheets/giles-f-filley-and-excelsior-stove-works
For another example of industrial history in St. Louis, check out one of my iron men essays, here: lafayettesquarearchives.com/1878-iron-men-the-pullis-brothers/
Fantastic article and your research is excellent!
My mom loved Magic Chef stoves. It was the only brand she said she could trust.
Thank you for all your hard work.
Thanks for the comment, and your readership! I really couldn’t write the article without reference to Magic Chef!
Mike ,
Do you think that the old Handlan Lantern & RR supply Co. may have had a tie to Buck Stove Co.? It’s name became Handlan – Buck .
Tom G.
Hi, Tom;
Handlan-Buck traces back to 1856, and M.M. Buck. They were the nation’s preeminent supplier of railroad lanterns, which must have been a bragging right in its day. In 1875, which is in the wheel house of this essay, it was located at 209 N. 3rd Street. Seems a tangent, though an interesting one.