Antique cast-iron wood burning wood stove.  As you know, I am going to be remodeling my kitchen to accommodate my Kineo B wood burning cook stove.  You probably think I'm a little bit nuts for doing something like this.  Yup.  You probably are correct in that way.  I probably am a little bit nuts.  I think of it as a challenge.  I like keeping the old ways and the old skills alive.  In some ways we have become too dependent on modern conveniences and modern technology.  In many ways I do enjoy having modern conveniences.  I like having air conditioning and refrigeration and gasoline powered automobiles.  I really do.  I would hate to live like the Amish.  But, I recognize that all of those modern conveniences are based upon fossil fuels that aren't going to last forever.  And, when they run out the old skills will need to be re-learned.  People are going to need to preserve the knowledge that they developed over many years.  We don't need to reinvent the wheel.


The old cast iron cook stoves were developed in the 1800's as a direct result of the development of cast iron.  Iron foundrys were developed in the 1700's and really became prominent in the 1800's.  Cast iron became common during the 1800's and was used in many big construction projects, including bridges and skyscrapers.  One place cast iron came to be used was in the kitchen.  Pots, pans, kitchen utensils, and especially, the stove.  People had been cooking over the fire in the fireplace before this, which was very inefficient.  Almost all the heat energy went up the chimney.  The cast iron stove immediately changed that.  An air-tight wood stove can convert 80-90 percent of the heat energy of the wood into heat used in cooking and heating the room.  That's a huge improvement in efficiency.


The cast iron wood stoves continued to be sold until the early 1900's when gasoline became available and was cheap enough to be used, then electric stoves and natural gas stoves took their place.  Then the old cast iron stoves went out to the scrap yard.  Many of them ended up out in the wood shed or the dump out in the back yard.


Some intrepid soul in the Bangor, Maine Public Library scanned the 1912 catalog of the Noyes and Nutter Manufacturing Company in Bangor.  Here's the front of the catalog.

Noyes & Nutter

They scanned it, put it in .pdf format, and made it available on the internet for people like me to find.  So what, you may ask?  Well, as it happens, Noyes and Nutter is the company that manufactured the cast iron stove that I bought.  My Kineo B.  And, if you look in the catalog, on page 26, there it is!

There it is.  Page 26 in the catalog.

My Kineo B stove.  If you closely at the shelf in front of the oven door, you can see  the words, "Noyes & Nutter Manufacturing Bangor, Maine."

It's pretty cool, having that documentation.  In a way, it's hard to believe that wood stoves were still being manufactured that late.  I suppose there were some people that still were not connected to rural  electric clear up into the late 1950's that had to depend on kerosene lamps and wood stoves.  Noyes and Nutter went out of business during the Great Depression along with a lot of other companies.  People just weren't buying anything during those years.