My brother has an impressive collection of baseball cards. Now, I don’t mean that he has three shoe boxes under his bed with maybe 4 dozen bundles of cards with a rubber band around them. I mean impressive. He started collecting baseball cards in the 1980s, just like every other boy born in the 1980s. The difference here is that he never stopped, but he also ceased being a kid about it at a remarkably young age.
By that I mean that he knew what he was doing. He knew which cards were in what set, and which variations existed of each. He knows the cards that are condition sensitive. He knows obscure sets that are incomplete and obscure sets that it’s not known whether they’re complete or not because it isn’t known how many cards were issued. And there’s no real boundary there, except for the 20th century.
It’s uncanny. And it goes beyond recall. He understands condition. He understands what creates certain types of damage. He (and I) worked in a paper factory for a very long time and so he can also identify what created given printing defects and at what stage in production it was likely to have happened. He also knows printing processes specific to baseball cards and how they can be used to authenticate them.
There are large and highly reputable organizations dedicated to grading cards. My brother has studied their criteria to the point that people in forums have posted their cards suggesting a given grade and my brother has pushed back and given rational and has been correct in his assessment every time once the individual has gotten their card back. He’s also developed his own method of removing wax stains from cards without damaging the condition in any way.
I bring this up for two reasons. The first is that we talk often about our respective hobbies–his being baseball cards and mine being cast iron cookware and related ephemera. Baseball cards were always meant to be collected. Because of that, there were pretty much always collectors.
Because of that, a lot can be known. Because of THAT, a lot IS known. There are thousands of books written on baseball cards, on the companies that made them, on the cards they made, when, and of whom. The history of the sport is part of the fabric of what it means to be a United States citizen. You don’t have to like baseball…but if you live here you know it. And you’ve probably played it.
He’s often been fairly jealous of how relatively little is known about cast iron. Baseball cards have a lot of history surrounding them, and it’s basically all known. With cast iron, there’s a decent amount known, but a whole, whoooooole lot more that isn’t. What is known is often either overshadowed by nonsense on popular sites perpetuating myths (knowingly or otherwise), hidden behind paywalls, or guarded by the gatekeepers of arcane frying pan knowledge. My brother’s jealousy is because there are still mysteries in this hobby. There is constant ongoing research and exciting things are found regularly.
The second reason I bring up this anecdote about my brother, is that this post is about another common childhood fascination: toys. Specifically toy stoves. There are a lot of them, but we’re talking about the cast iron variety here. The subset of cast iron enthusiasm that focuses on little stoves is susceptible to one of the most pervasive myths in the entire world of cast iron enthusiasm: the salesman’s sample.
For all intents and purposes, there weren’t any salesman’s samples. Salesmen didn’t roam the countryside with incredibly generic and nonfunctional stove shaped objects to advertise items that looked only generally similar and which performed a real lot differently if you built a fire in them. The stoves shown in catalogs are almost universally completely different than the wee stoves we find in antique shops and in our parents’ and grandparents’ china cabinets. There’s a reason for that.
So for the next several paragraphs we’re going to take a look at why I say the salesman’s sample pretty much doesn’t exist, and also what I mean by “pretty much.” Because what I mean is not that “yours is the exception.” True samples are exceptionally rare, to the point that it’s almost impossible to prove without provenance or another example with provenance to draw from.
For the most part, the toy stoves you’re likely to see fit into one of two patents.
Recognize this one? This is the patent image for a Toy Stove patented by Peter G. Wing on September 17, 1907. The details of the shelves and doors differ, sometimes theres an extension shelf off the right, and roughly 7,409 different names have been emblazoned across the front, but every single one of them is a toy. The full patent can be seen here.
The second one is a bit beefier of a character. Patented on July 30, 1895 by Charles Bailey, this one is also (spoiler alert) a Toy Stove. When you run into a Bailey’s patent, it’s gonna be a considerably larger and in a relative sense, wider as well. This one even says Rival, which is a fairly common one to find. The full patent can be seen here.
For a bit more context here, this is an image of a 1922 catalog page, which shows both Bailey’s and Wing’s patents as well as several other commonly found toy stoves. If your toy stove looks like these, it is a toy. There isn’t anything else for it to be.
Here is a toy stove marked Crescent, which belonged to my Nana. See how the door is open there? You can see there’s nowhere for a rack to be placed, partly because the oven opens up directly into where the firebox would be. It’s worth noting that the firebox would be there if this were a sample meant to demonstrate the features and functionality of a stove. Another telltale sign is that the base and legs are all one piece with the body. If this were meant to be advertising an existing model stove on any level, it would be reflected in the construction.
The bottom is fairly crudely shaped sheet metal. These were made in roughly the mid 20th century. The smaller one below belonged to my great grandmother. I didn’t know her incredibly well but as far as I know, she never roamed the countryside with a sack filled with these things to demonstrate to people what a stove looked like. That’s really all the information you’d get from this.
From the 1895 Wilkins Toy Catalogue, these two are less common to find. Notice the dimensions–these were fairly big items, and pieces made this early were of a higher quality than the mid 20th century piece shown above, which had a roughly formed sheet metal base. Full catalog here.
From a late 1920s Kenton Hardware Co. toy catalogue, the Model isn’t very common to find and if you didn’t know better, you might think this was a salesman’s sample of the Spicers & Peckham Model Cook. It’s not, though, and if you’ll refer back to the start of this post, you’ll see that the “Design Patented” refers to one of the two patents mentioned earlier. We’ll also meet a Spicers & Peckham miniature later in this post. There are a slew of toy stoves in this catalogue and I encourage everyone reading to check it out here, pages 6-28. You’ll recognize many common designs. Lastly, note the similarities and differences between this 1920s toy and the 1895 page posted just above.
Now there are a mess of other toy stoves that don’t fall into either of these patents, some of which are shown in the catalogues linked above. Does that mean you’ve found a salesman’s sample? No. It doesn’t. One of the primary ways we can tell this is, you guessed it, more catalog images. I have one in my own collection, which is remarkably well-made, complete with vents on the bottom in case you do decide to build a wee fire in it. What’s incredibly notable in making the determination is the grate with fire painted on it which prevents you from accessing the oven, and also that base is steel, and not cast.
It’s a bit rusted (I’ve since spent some time cleaning it) but you can see this piece is considerably different the the others shown. You can see how the plates fit together, you can see that there are vents on the bottom, and it’s a huge departure from the designs shown above. This speaks to the variety in toy stove design and also suggests that “toy” doesn’t necessarily preclude some amount of functionality. I’d avoid it though, as it can damage what little is left of the paint, including the faux flames on the grate.
Here’s the same stove, shown in the 1883 J & E Stevens toy catalog. If you’ve been following my descent into the insanity of cast iron enthusiasm, you may know why this particular toy piqued my interest: Bay State was the flagship line of the Barstow Stove Company. And because I don’t want you to simply take my word for it, here is the link to the full catalog. Note that the cover says “established 1843,” and the letter To The Trade on the first page states they’ve been in operation 40 years–hence the date of 1883.
Next thing to discuss is: What if my tiny stove is actually fully functional?
Well, this is where there is a wee-bit of grey area. See, there actually were some “salesman’s samples,” which I think they would more appropriately be called demo or display models, but I don’t tend to get consulted on stuff like that. Regardless, there were (and are) a WHOLE LOT MORE functional toys. And a whole lot more highly ornate toys put out by foundries as miniature replicas and which are impressive but where something is just “off” when compared to their full-sized counterparts.
There are actually some real horror stories about the somehow unforeseen dangers of giving a small child a functional stove for them to play with in the house. Even the toys like shown above can “function.” They may not have the engineering that goes into a stove, but they’re still a metal box with a door and some amount of ventilation, and so they can work well enough as a stove. There can be found a decent amount of articles of house fires and even deaths based on the wonderful idea of a functioning toy stove, and they’re not for the faint of heart.
June 12, 1915, the New York Herald reported that five year old girl Edna May Frost was burned to death when cooking for her doll. With the introduction of electric and eventually heat-lamp powered toy stoves, these types of stories thankfully became much less common. This article was from the Chemung County Historical Society, from a post on toy stoves.
In the first half of the 20th century, one incredibly popular toy stove that was fully functional and if you dig enough, also has a legacy similar to the article shown above, is the Dolly’s Favorite. The Dolly’s Favorite was produced by Favorite Stoves and Ranges, out of Piqua Ohio. They had an impressive array of high-quality stoves and cookware, and their products are generally quite collectible today–Dolly’s Favorite included.
Dolly’s Favorite is a very attractive little stove and one of the advertising gimmicks for both Favorite Stoves and Ranges as well as the Dolly’s Favorite was to schedule “Children’s Days,” during which there would be a cooking demonstration. Here, Mrs. Powell was advertised to be “doing some of the finest cooking and baking anyone ever saw” on this fully functional little toy range.
A less detailed illustration, this ad states that the Dolly’s Favorite is the “smallest range in the world that cooks and bakes perfectly.” As a fun twist, the bottom half advertises that there are ranges for mom, too.
Here it is in the flesh. This range is deceptively large having just looked at a bunch of smaller toys. This is 18 3/4″ wide and 11″ deep. With the high shelf it stands just over 3′ tall. You can see from the picture it still neatly fits within the discussed patents but this is a fully functional stove that “will cook and bake everything that mother’s big stove will cook.” You’ll also notice that the stoves pictured in the ads don’t quite match this one. And by “don’t quite” I mean “don’t at all.”
Here you can see a damper control is missing but it’s clearly marked Dolly’s Favorite as well as by the manufacturer. This is a fun one that’s definitely a toy, but also a completely functional unit. This and above photo courtesy of Kerri Anderson.
Here is another really handsome little stove that’s actually quite a bit larger than many we see. Those two pieces of cookware on top are probably about 5″ diameter so it’s a pretty decent size.
This is the same model but a different example. Two of the little doors are open. This one is an example of a domestic trainer range.
Here you can see that door that you’d expect to open to the firebox actually opens to…basically nothing. Theres a nice and fairly ornate oven rack in there.
From this angle we see a good amount of the fine details. This one is a single piece for the body and legs, and despite the ornamentation it was made with minimal parts because parts and children get frustrating and complicated pretty quickly.
Ok so now that I’ve thoroughly depressed you about the likelihood of your wee stove being a salesman’s sample and not a toy, let’s move on to the next section: Salesman’s Samples.
They do exist. Sort of. They’re not the type of thing that you’d just get for free like when you’re walking through the super market and someone is whipping up a hot plate of sausage and peppers so you can sample something. These were more…demonstration models. They were called samples at the time, and so we call them samples here. But sample nowadays conjures up images of free goodies and swag, when these were used to demonstrate design and, more importantly, functionality.
But it’s also complicated. There are articles that describe perfect replica miniature toy ranges, and we’ll get a look at one momentarily. I think these sort of straddled the toy/sample boundary and it brings something to mind that I haven’t seen brought up before: Toys aren’t just for children.
Think about it. How many fully adult model enthusiasts are there? You’ve got your toy cars, your model kits for children, and then more advanced model kits which you’re most likely not going to be able to complete with the dexterity and patience of a 12 year old. In my opinion there is an added level of toy that’s a tier above what we’ve discussed so far. We can consider them scale models. They’re one part toy, one part calling card. You’d find them at trade fairs or maybe hardware stores on display, but probably not be picking one up for your kid. You could get it for your kid, sure. But there’s a lot of appeal to “the kid in you” when looking at stuff like this.
This is another article which is just begging for some more information. At the end it states that the Michigan Stove Company is now offering miniatures of their Garland Steel range–“complete in detail.” This is pretty early at 1894, but there was a lot going on earlier than this, and no reason to think similar practices weren’t going on for iron stoves as well.
Another excerpt, this time from 1895 with instruction from the Michigan Stove Company on how to set up a window display to show a toy stove. This one ends with the intention of influencing parents to look into the full sized offerings. It doesn’t go on to specify the material of the stove, which is a bit frustrating but also may simply be because they had multiple stoves and multiple miniatures.
These toys are a different breed. Fully functional, highly ornate and complete to the smallest details, yet also considerably smaller than domestic training ranges. Honestly they’re right around the same size of the Wing’s or Bailey’s patent stoves and, except for the fact that they’re exact copies of patented stoves and also a whole lot more parts, they could be mistaken for one of the two at first glance. On closer inspection, some of the very fine details and functionality are different or omitted.
They’re sort of on par with true samples, and on some level they’d play that role. But nobody was showing up to your house with one to get you to buy it. Rather, the manufacturers were putting an incredible and painstaking level of care into the production of these things, with the hopes that on seeing the skill of production and the name of the firm who made it, you’d keep them in mind when it was time to upgrade or replace your current stove.
This piece here was made by Spicers & Peckham. It is incredible in detail and a cut above other toys I’ve seen. The construction is exact. There are also examples marked Model Art which are identical except for the name. They are perfect miniature reproductions of the full sized Model Art ranges. So…if they were a “sample,” why would they sometimes be named for a stove that doesn’t exist?
Missing the shelves in the oven, you can see that the oven wall is not the same as the outside wall. This is because if you fired this teeny thing up, the air would circulate through the cavity around the oven, heating it evenly.
From the side, you have the open broiler damper control and the ash door. Again, fully functional. A toy for a child doesn’t need such a silly level of detail, but this model is also leaving out some bits and fudging others.
From up top, you can see the grate inside. You could easily drop some fuel in there and light this. And then the stove eye covers. Look at the incredible detail. They’re perfect reproductions and not just reminiscent.
Here you can see the body lifts off the base. You can also see that the base and legs are all separate pieces affixed with bolts. That’s also a very well-made but teeny stove pipe. That little guy behind is is a very nice Orr & Painter toy stove that also straddles the line between toy and sample, but the Dainty name and single piece body makes it pretty clear this is on the toy-er end of things. It’s worth noting that there are period articles describing perfectly detailed miniature toys.
No debate where this one came from. But is it a toy or a sample? To me this is a toy. This mark on the back pushes it to novelty level. Maybe you’d pick them up at trade shows, and likely some were displayed at hardware stores that were dealers of Spicers & Peckham. They’d be an excellent advertiser with this level of detail, but they never sold a “Tarbox” stove, and this miniature is otherwise identical to the Model Art miniature, which was an actual stove and this is a copy of it. I don’t know why they’d have a toy with a different name, but Tarbox is a common surname in the area, so it may be somehow tied to a member of the firm.
These were a different caliber of craftsmanship than any of the toys shown above, including the Dolly’s Favorite. They were meticulously crafted with some details that are so impressive they LOOK frustrating just thinking about the casting. They had functional damper controls, grates, and every detail down to the notches in the stove eye covers were included. But when they’re toys, sometimes things aren’t there even when most of it is. The Tarbox/Model Art is missing a damper control entirely, and the front damper control is a larger bit that works and demonstrates but doesn’t look the same.
The eye covers one the left lift off to reveal the fire box with grates that fall down in to an ash pan, which has an access point through the ash door but is NOT accessible through the oven. The eye covers on the right lift off to reveal the top of the oven, which is not open but rather there is a cavity around it which allows air from the fire box to circulate around the body of the oven itself and heat it evenly.
Dampers open and close and are fully functional, broiler dampers included. The tiny stove pipe is an incredibly accurate and, surprise, fully functional sheet metal stove pipe which must have been painstaking to replicate in such miniature. All panels with doors have doors that are functional, with the exact functionality they have in full scale. Lastly, the body of the stove lifts out of the base, and the base itself can be disassembled into the front and back pieces as well as the four legs.
I don’t know how many of you all have kids. But who here would buy their kid a toy that had 6,502 parts? Even the functional toy stoves or “domestic trainers” didn’t get this intricate. The castings were ornamental, but not to this extent. But they’re also toy sized, not the scaled up toy size of domestic training stoves.
As I said above, at first glance this seems like a sample. But in the minutia lies the answer. A sample wouldn’t omit or alter a damper for ease of construction. And the calling card on the back is just tacky for something as elaborate as a sample. They could do the castings as finely as they wanted, but they wanted the big text as an advertisement. And you don’t need explicit advertisement when a salesman is giving you a demonstration.
As for the time period of these, I have a pretty high degree of confidence that these weren’t actually produced by Spicers & Peckham when they were Spicers & Peckham. In the 1880s, Charles Peckham retired and they became the Spicer Stove Company. In 1900, they were bought out by the Barstow Stove Company under the presidency of John Palmer Barstow.
John Palmer grew up in the spoils of his family’s business, and went to Brown University to study business. He wasn’t a nitty gritty foundry worker like his father or grandfather before him, but he was a fantastically brilliant businessman. It’s in this time period of the Barstow Stove Company that you see numerous acquisitions and intricate/elaborate advertising pieces. They also reverted back to the Spicers & Peckham name due to brand recognition. And for the most part, it seems like Barstow allowed pretty broad autonomy to their previous competitor.
I firmly believe these pieces to have been produced by Spicers & Peckham under the ownership of the Barstow Stove Company. Similarly there are Richmond Stove Company advertisers produced by the Barstow Stove Company in the same time period. John Palmer Barstow consolidated related or competitive local firms with strong brand recognition and a history of integrity and then sort of let them continue to do their own thing. But he worked hard to stand apart from the competition in his advertising. These stoves are a reflection of that.
The Spicers & Peckham toys are fairly common as far as this stuff goes. You might not see them everyday like you do the more common toys, but they do come around. I’m pretty confident examples of these and others like it from competing brands were produced by the foundries themselves, and not some outside toy or hardware manufacturer (like the Bay State above).
I’ve yet to dig up the entirety of the application of these things, but there are a few obvious applications that come to mind. The first is that hardware stores in smaller, possibly rural regions wouldn’t be the largest stores or sales rooms, but major manufacturers would have authorized dealers all over. These hole in the wall shops wouldn’t have room for 48 stoves representing the most prominent manufacturers’ most popular lines. No…they’d have a few full size models and likely little demo models that would be cased up for safe keeping or possibly on display at a sales counter. A customer would come up and say they were looking for a stove or range, and the salesman would ask some question and then break out some of the more popular models that meet the customers’ needs.
From volume 25, page 17 of the 1895 Stoves and Hardware Reporter. This plainly states that a traveling salesman for a “St. Louis stove house” told a merchant he’d have better luck selling stoves if he kept his sample in better order. This is tantalizing, but it’ could be a small, sample model of a stove. Or it could be’s most likley a full size “sample” for use in house. Stove-specific retailers would have sample rooms, similar to shopping for a stove today.
The next reason could possibly be for trade fairs. These were commonplace and high quality advertising and demonstrations were common. With rows of model year products, a smaller model might be handy for demonstrations apart from the crowds. Possible, likely I think, but not exactly proven.
Lastly, a local dealer, big city or not, could make a visit to a retailer or even be called to a home if the establishment were feeling generous. These traveling salesman would have a perfect range, in miniature, to demonstrate the functionality of stoves and fill orders from the demonstrations given. Not as good as a full sized sample, but it still did the trick.
From the 1921 Nebraska Iron Monger, this is one of the few references I’ve seen that are unambiguous in their references to miniature samples. This manufacturer had 12 women who were traveling salespeople for the firm, and each had their own sample for demonstrations.
Now for the last piece of this puzzle. A confirmed sample. This one isn’t a stove, it’s a furnace. But it’s also a very well known brand: Glenwood.
Sitting on top of a full sized Glenwood, this is an amazing and unambiguous example of a salesman sample. It’s missing the top piece which would have originally had the octopus-looking piping coming out.
Once again, beautiful functionality in the doors. See the holes in the back of the top? Those are cast, not drilled. Thinking of casting this gives me palpitations. And those knobs underneath where it says Weir Stove? Those turn the four rotating grates inside. That’s right, each knob turns to rotating grates which are geared to turn together. This piece is astounding.
Removing the top you can see more intricacy in the design. But wait, it gets better.
Fully removed and looking inward, you can see the ash compartment, which has a tiny shovel to demonstrate as well. At this point I should mention that we have full provenance on this piece.
Here we see the four triangular rotating grates. I’m turning those on the left and you can see they’re oriented differently. This is all cast. This piece was in the Glenwood factory when it closed in July, 1949. On the clean out it was picked up by one individual, who then sold it to Brandon Pineo of the Antique Stove Hospital. He was incredibly gracious in climbing atop a bunch of stuff to get this off a high shelf in the back of his showroom. The Spicers & Peckham, Orr & Painter, and Uncle Sam are all in his showroom and pictures are shared with his permission.
This Glenwood furnace sample is incredible. It originally had a leather case which is present in some other examples of this same piece that has been found. While it would have been nice to have the case, what the other pieces do not have, is provenance. This is a sample that was in the Glenwood building, it has changed hands twice since being with Glenwood and is now owned by one of the most reputable sources of information on antique stoves in the United States, if not the entire world.
We have a whole mess of examples of different stoves, from cheesy stove shaped toy, to really attractive but functionally fairly useless toy, to domestic training “toy” stoves, and finally, to the sample stove. Each obvious toy shares a pretty basic design, most of which are fairly similar to one another. They have minimal moving or removable parts–only those that you’d actually regularly interact with and that would probably frustrate a kid if these features weren’t present. The functional toys have grates, fireboxes, and shelves which are all useful, and some were specifically manufactured as domestic training stoves.
Even then, things are somewhat minimal. Oftentimes they are on solid piece with no removable legs. They are designed to be something a parent would want a child to have.
This is sort of an “if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all” situation. Even the more unique pieces like the Bay State toy stove I showed above is similar in that it’s one piece with minimal interactivity–the minimal interactivity required to make it fun while also allowing it to be pretty easy to produce.
Above these are the highly ornate miniature reproductions of actual stoves. These are “calling cards” and effective advertising pieces. But some functionality or design is slightly compromised and oftentimes the foundry is displayed in such prominence that it’s clearly trying to get your attention to the brand. Not a sample because a salesman doesn’t need that kind of advertising, but they’re more of an advertising replica model that either a toy or a sample. Models, being toys, are still toys.
Then, you get to the samples. There is nothing spared here. Even components nobody but someone servicing the unit would see. And these don’t just look like the components, they’re exact replicas manufactured in the exact same way. There is absolutely no reason for a rotating grate to be geared to rotate in tandem with its counterpart when the knob outside is turned. That’s the level of detail we see in samples and it is nothing close to what we see in even the most extravagant of toys.
The problem with identifying legitimate samples often comes down to provenance. Nobody cared about this stuff until “we” decided it was cool. Antiques enthusiasts are a knowledgable bunch but there hasn’t been a whole lot of academic research on this stuff. That’s not to knock anyone, it’s just that not a whole heap of people have approached this from a “what information can I find, compile, distill, and share with the world on this” perspective. The existence of samples is debated by some of the more seasoned collectors in the hobby. And that almost every single one is a toy is a statement fervently argued against by at least 80% of people encountered.
Again, this is “fine” and nothing to be mad at anyone about. It just speaks to the utter dearth of legitimate research done by those who are skilled in doing it AND willing to actually share their work. I hope–I really do–that what little work I have done to contribute to the knowledge base underpinning this hobby is enough to inspire some more people to do the same.
