Every now and then, I’m struck by some very disparate items on the auction tables and on the floor. At one of my favorite auction houses recently, four things stopped me:
Two settees with side chairs and armchair. A Caloric iron stove. A Wanamaker iron radiator. An iron fireplace grate.
Everywhere I went, iron and wood seemed to be in my face (the auction house was also holding a special sale on toys, many of them metal).
The settee set was the first thing I saw when I entered the large open room at the auction house. The five pieces had been arranged facing each other and placed on top of a red-and-black-patterned rug. Throw pillows had been tossed on the settees and two vintage tables and a lamp had been added to round out the arrangement.
The settees and chairs had a Colonial or Windsor feel to them, with their simple design and open backs. Hand-painted on the top front were white flowers with leaves.
They made you wanna sit down and have a conversation, but I’m not sure how long you’d be comfortable without cushions. These settees were much like the earliest ones, though. A form of what we consider settees has been around since the 17th century, but they were known as settles then, according to the 1948 book “Antique Furniture for Modern Rooms” by Edward Wenham. With upholstery came the name settee in the 18th century, along with the Chippendale brand and the Georgian style. The name settee and sofa became interchangeable around that time, too.
At auction, the five pieces sold for $200.
As for the Caloric stove, this wasn’t the first one I’d seen at this auction house, and like the the others, it looked to be an early one. I could find very little about the company, which was based in Grand Rapids, MI. I did find a cookbook – probably handed out free as advertising – from 1908 called “Caloric Book of Recipes” that you can download.
The commentary at the front provided some insight into the culture and thinking at the time. A 3 ½-page section called “The Caloric from a Social Standpoint” outlined why having a Caloric Fireless Cooker was so important to housewives. First, though, it patronized them by suggesting that they “carefully” study the directions for using it and that it’ll take time for the “thoughtful housewife” to master the new stove.
It went on to say that using the Caloric would bring peace and quiet to a household where the husband was tired and hungry after a hard day at work and the housewife was harried from upkeep of the house, making meals and raising the children. The Caloric would not only save time and fuel costs, the cookbook said, but would also give her more hours to spend with her children.
How nice.
I thought the stove itself – with some cleaning of its porcelain oven front, grates and the rest – would be neat if you could find an innovative way to use it. And an easy way to get it home; it must have weighed a ton.
The Wanamaker heater with its metal cutouts was another design treat. It looked to be in good condition – again it could use a good cleaning – and may still have had some years on it. At one time, Wanamaker, the venerable department store that was long a fixture in Philadelphia, manufactured its own products. Maybe this was one of them. The store had been around long enough (since 1876) that I’m sure it sold what its customers wanted at any given time. This radiator looked like an antique.
The iron fireplace grate was the most unadorned and least striking. But I loved it for its squat shape, its open-cathedral edgings and its legs that reminded me of a bulldog’s.
