Inventing the US Stove Industry
The Making of:
This article had its origins in the first serious paper I wrote after the commencement of my stove research in the summer of 2004. I had given a couple of Powerpoint presentations to research seminars in my own department, Cambridge, and Oxford, but not written a thing, which is not the sort of behavior likely to impress one's employing institution. I had made two very rewarding research trips -- to Detroit, Albany, and Troy in September 2005, and then back to Albany and Troy for a fortnight the following April -- largely financed by my university, so its opinion mattered to me. I wanted to visit the Capital District at least once more, to finish off the abundant materials I had found there. I also knew that there were some promising manuscript collections at the Hagley Museum and Library, only one of which (the Reading Stove Works board minutes, 1891-1903) had I ever looked at, on an earlier trip in 1998 when I was working on the history of the foundry industry and its technology. So the logical thing to do was to apply once again to the Hagley for a grant-in-aid, and offer to sing for my supper by giving a paper to their seminar. This would help pay my expenses across the Atlantic and while I was resident at the Hagley, give me a good audience to write for and speak to, and also provide me with the benefits of being a guest researcher (e.g., then, the freedom to take books from the Library overnight, and work on them in the subsidized lodgings on the Hagley site), after which I could skip off on a side trip to Albany. So I made my applications and proposal, and my old friends at the Hagley said yes.
The paper I gave them in April 2007 was called "Making and Selling the First Universal Consumer Durables: The Cast-Iron Stove Industry in Victorian America." It stands up surprisingly well after more than five years, and a lot more research. It introduced many of the issues I would return to, and arguments I would develop, in three of the four articles that have grown from it (there is less of it in "Conquering Winter" than anywhere else, because of the particular character of that piece -- its Building Research and Information commission, its anti-William Meyer structure).
However, it was more of the sketch of the book I thought then that I would go on to write than it was a free-standing article I could ever hope to publish. The opportunity to do that arose with the commissioning of a special issue of the Business History Review on the history of marketing and salesmanship. This grew out of a conference organized by the guest editor, Andrew Popp, and Peter Scott, at Reading University [England] in February 2007, and fortunately they decided that a revised version of my Hagley paper would fit well within the journal (though with a snappier title than the one I gave it -- a quotation, "Unfortunately we have to be merchants as well as manufacturers, which adds to the complexity of our business"). Even more pleasingly, the Review decided to give the article, not just plenty of space and room for some nice, value-adding illustrations, but its Henrietta Larson award, for the best article in the 2008 volume.
The main differences between the Hagley paper and the final version were partly driven by the agenda of the special issue of the journal, hence the emphasis on the development of marketing networks and sales techniques. But this was also a result of the strong influence of what I thought of as my best source materials at the time -- the inbound correspondence (from customers and the firm's New York shop managers and travelling salesmen in the Midwest and Southwest) of Marcus Filley's Green Island Stove Works, Troy, from the 1850s until the 1880s; Detroit and Reading Stove Works records from the 1860s to the early 1900s, which were also rich with marketing references; hundreds of manufacturers' trade catalogues; the trade journals, particularly The Metal Worker [New York] and Stove and Hardware Reporter [St. Louis]; and the trade association proceedings. But what now strikes me as the more significant difference is that when I wrote "Making and Selling," about all that I really knew about the early nineteenth-century (pre-1830s/1840s) organization of stove manufacturing and trade was derived from secondary reading, particularly Joseph Walker's work on Hopewell Furnace. However, when I went to the Hagley in 2007, I started working on the extraordinarily rich papers of the proprietors of two other major charcoal-fuelled iron furnaces producing large numbers of stoves. My understanding of the world before the 1840s was transformed, and my interest grew. Writing "Conquering Winter" at the same time as I was rewriting my Hagley paper for publication had a decisive impact on me, making me conclude that I could not write the planned book on the stove industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century without doing a proper job on the "prehistory" first.
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