Figure 1. Cast iron stove in the “modern kitchen” of the Durant-Peterson House Museum.
The Durant-Peterson House Museum provides many examples of what life was like for families living on the prairie in the 1800s.
The house has two kitchens—one with a hearth used by Jerusha Durant and a “modern kitchen” with a cast iron stove used by Christina Peterson. The evolution of cooking can be witnessed within this one house!
The original brick home was built in 1843 by Bryant Durant. Bryant and his wife, Jerusha, raised six children in the home. While Bryant tended to the farm, Jerusha spent time in the keeping room where the hearth was located. The hearth (fireplace) was used to heat the home and prepare food. This was not an easy task for a pioneer woman in a long dress and petticoat. Imagine bending over hot coals while roasting meat, cooking beans, and having to boil water before doing laundry or taking a bath. Back pain and the threat of setting oneself on fire were common.
In 1880, when their children had grown, Bryant and Jerusha left the brick home and moved to town. That’s when Godfrey Peterson, a Swedish farmhand employed by Durant, rented the home and land. Godfrey, Christina, and their baby daughter, Mabel, moved in.
Peterson promptly improved the house by adding a “modern” kitchen! What made this kitchen special was the cast iron stove. Christina Peterson would not be burdened by having to do all her cooking in front of an open hearth like homemakers had been doing for hundreds of years. Back pain and the threat of fire were greatly diminished.
Stove-making began to flourish in the mid-nineteenth century because of changes in the iron and steel industry. Stoves were preferred because they required less fuel and were more economical to install than hearths. The cast iron cookstove may be viewed as the most critical contribution to domestic technology of the nineteenth century.
A modern cast iron stove weighed between 400 and 600 pounds. There were dozens of manufacturers, each one offering a variety of special features. Features a homemaker might have considered for her new stove were:
Multiple heat plates
Warming trivets
Waffle press
An oven with a door
So, how did a homemaker of the time decide on what new stove to purchase?
Figure 2. Cast iron stove salesman’s sample
There were no stores or catalogs that carried the various models. Salesmen often travelled from house to house or farm to farm. Instead of having the salesmen haul heavy full-sized stoves to each household, the manufacturers made hand-held examples of their various models to help the housewife make her purchase. A salesman’s sample four-plate stove with an oven, warming tray, and stovepipe donated recently to the Durant-Peterson House Museum looks like a child’s toy, but it’s not (see figure 2). These miniature models were important tools for the stove salesmen. They were much easier to transport so that multiple models could be shown to housewives, which likely increased sales.
The full-size cast iron stove in the “modern” Peterson Kitchen is not the original stove that the Peterson family used but is similar. From museum inventory records dated 11/14/1973, it was purchased from Howard J. Hall from Elburn, Illinois. It was given inventory item K-10 (the tenth item added to the Peterson Kitchen inventory). The stove was manufactured by a Michigan-based company called The Peninsular Stove Company (see figure 3).
Figure 3. Close-up of the label of the stove donated to the Durant-Peterson House Museum by Howard J. Hall of Elburn, Illinois in 1973.
In the 1870s and 1880s, stoves were Detroit's leading industry, producing more than 10 percent of the world’s stoves. This was due in no small part to the abundance of iron ore in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and ease of transporting it on the Great Lakes, especially following the opening of the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., in 1855. (Iron ore is used to make steel and iron, required at the time for stoves.)
Visitors to the Durant-Peterson House Museum begin their tour by walking through the original brick home and viewing a cooking demonstration in the wood-burning fireplace in the Durant Hearth Room.
When they walk into the Peterson Kitchen, chances are Susan Wukitsch, our knowledgeable docent, has built a fire in the wood box of the stove. On open days in the winter, the stove warms the room and offers Susan a place to demonstrate cooking on the old-fashioned stove.
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