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Pamela Higgins with her vintage Chambers stove, which dates back to the early 1950s, in the kitchen at her home in Yarmouth. Higgins has had the enamel-over-cast-iron stove for more than 40 years, and it has moved with her five times. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald When young marrieds Pamela Higgins and her husband bought their home in Baltimore County, Maryland, the small galley kitchen came with a 1951 Chambers stove.
The stove was pristine, and sure, once it’d been the latest thing, coveted by housewives in America’s postwar economic boom. But by 1983, when the Higgins moved in, not so much. Someone else might have taken one look and thought “kitchen reno.
Stat!” Not Higgins. An avid cook who’d grown up in an 1865 farmhouse built by her great-grandfather, she took to it from the start. “It’s like I was born knowing how to cook on this stove,” she said recently.
Today, the 74-year-old Chambers stove has been with the family through countless meals, 42 years (the same age as their firstborn) and five moves — most recently to Yarmouth. In the couple’s serene kitchen in their beautiful new home, it has pride of place. Even amid a plethora of Asian artwork and antiques and lovely views of field and water, it draws the eye.
The Higgins’ relocation to Maine, begun in 2015, dragged — stalled first by their search for the perfect retirement house, then, after they made the decision to build a house instead, by the vagaries of pandemic supply chains . By the time they moved in, they’d been living in provisional rentals with inadequate kitchens for seven years. Meanwhile, Pamela Higgins’ beloved Chambers stove was in storage, first in Maryland, then in Maine.
The well-traveled stove also had a layover in New Jersey, for a thorough checkup by a vintage stove specialist, before, at last, it was installed in the Higgins’ light-filled kitchen and running like it had just left the factory floor. “Probably the thing that I’ve made most on this stove in my time is chicken stock. There’s just something so comforting, and it is the basis of so many things that I make,” Higgins said in late April while pointing out the stove’s ingenious features.
“I felt like when we finally got here, and I made the first batch of chicken stock on the stove — that we had finally moved to Maine.” She paused, almost as if smelling fragrant stock. “OK, now we’re here.
” The Higgins’ kitchen is one of eight featured on this year’s annual Falmouth Kitchen Tour on May 10. Robert Bernheim occasionally bakes bagels in the 1820 beehive oven that is built into the hearth of his home in China. Courtesy of Robert Bernheim We put a call out to Mainers asking them to tell us about their antique and vintage stoves.
We were delighted by the number of responses from around the state. We heard about wood-burning, coal-burning, gas and electric stoves; Chambers, Queen Atlantics (made in Portland), Kineos (made in Bangor), Fortress Crawfords, Glenwoods, even a built-in 1820 beehive fireplace oven. We learned about stoves that date back to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt yet are still in use in Maine kitchens today.
Their appeal is durability, beauty and memories, say vintage and antique stove enthusiasts — not necessarily in that order. As Joel Goodstadt of the Unity-based restoration business Stove Man of Maine put it, “The kitchen is the center of your home. And the center of your kitchen is your stove.
” A closeup of the sturdy, attractive knobs on Pamela Higgins’ vintage Chambers stove. As antique stove specialist David Erickson said, “People love beautiful, artistic, well-thought-out objects in their home.” Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald BUILT TO LAST If you are looking for proof of the adage they don’t make ’em like they used to, you’ve come to the right place.
“A $6,000 modern stove is nothing like a stove from the past,” Goodstadt said. “Those (old) stoves are like bricks. They run and run and run and run.
They are almost indestructible.” “The Chambers company was so successful that their stoves almost never broke down,” he went on. “They almost put themselves out of business because you never had to buy another stove.
That’s a true story.” (The company stopped manufacturing stoves in 1988.) Case in point: When Rosanne Tartaro-O’Donnell moved to Belmont from her home in the Bronx, New York, in 2013, she lugged her grandmother’s well-used 1940s white enamel Chambers stove.
It now sits in the corner of a kitchen she designed to accommodate it. As a little girl, Tartaro-O’Donnell learned how to cook on this very stove: “gravy” every Sunday, struffoli cookies every year at Christmastime and daily meals for her large, extended Italian-American family. “Think of every day since 1956,” Tartaro-O’Donnell said, which was the year her family acquired the stove.
“I mean seriously,” she added, “back then, they made things to last. They were proud of their work. The term ‘planned obsolescence’ was not in their vocabulary.
” To supplement her stove, Higgins put in a wall oven and microwave. A larger oven can come in handy, as she found out “the hard way” one Thanksgiving years ago, when she had a sizable — too sizable, as it turned out — holiday bird. Higgins loves her new appliances, “but honestly, 10 years,” she said, referring to how long she expects they’ll last.
“The refrigerator, too. And these things are not inexpensive.” As for her septuagenarian Chambers? “I think we’ll go out together,” she said, smiling.
In his 1918 farmhouse in Woolwich, Joe Bisson cooks on a 1958 “Daisy” Gibson electric stove. “The Daisy’s the Cadillac of her day,” he said, sounding like a proud dad. “She’s got all the bells and whistles.
” He paid $150 for the oven, which he restored himself using parts from a similar model he bought for $100. Though Bisson doesn’t know what the stove cost new, “I would assume she was pretty expensive,” he said, “but certainly the investment paid off, because 75 years later, it’s still working.” David Erickson has restored stoves, including many in Maine, for almost 50 years at Erickson’s Antique Stoves in Littleton, Massachusetts.
“I tell my customers, ‘Before you buy one of these, you need to consult your attorney and change your will.’ They say, ‘What are you talking about?’ I say, ‘Because when you’re dead, all of your grandchildren will be fighting over which one is going to get it.’ These stoves will last another hundred years.
” HEY, GOOD LOOKIN’ Joe Bisson found his Daisy stove on Facebook Marketplace. The buttons that regulate the burner heat can be a little finicky, he said. Courtesy of Joe Bisson For Bisson, longevity was only part of its appeal.
When he bought his house, it came with a 1980s stove “that just didn’t have any style at all.” His Daisy, on the other hand, he describes as “pretty cool.” (Also true of the 1956 Nash Metropolitan he is working on to get back on the road.
) Daisy’s features certainly sound “pretty cool.” There’s a built-in ozonator to eliminate bad smells like fried fish, eight buttons (per burner!) to set heat levels, an “ups-a-daisy” deep well cooker for long-simmering dishes likes soups and stews, plus an accessory that Bisson introduced himself. He replaced the stove’s standard fluorescent light with an LED color strip, which can flash colors; he and his girlfriend jokingly call it “disco Daisy mode.
” James Schwartz, a former restaurant critic for the Press Herald, cooks on a 1917 (or thereabouts) Insulated Glenwood Deluxe when he’s at his 1916 summer home on the Blue Hill Peninsula. The “ancient” electric stove that came with the house threw sparks whenever Schwartz turned it on. Schwartz found his “new” stove at Bryant’s Stove & Music in Thorndike, a store/museum many owners of old stoves still name with reverence.
The place closed about six years ago when its owners died; the museum’s contents were auctioned off in 2021. “I really wanted something as simple, as small, as basic as the house itself,” Schwartz wrote in an email. “Aesthetically, I just think it is a stunner .
.. a beautiful product of thoughtful industrial design: the porcelain handles that control the gas .
.. the cast iron burners .
.. the sinuous supports.
She’s a thing of beauty.” James Schwartz cooks on this stove at his summer home in Blue Hill. Courtesy of James Schwartz Schwartz, and just about everybody else, sent photographs to underline his point.
“As you can tell by the photo, it is a beauty,” Sue Loomis said of her 1911 six-burner, wood-burning Fortress Crawford Cookstove. She and her husband Rick bought it when they lived in Bridgton some 50 years ago. It happened like this: The Loomis family’s Fortress Crawford cookstove.
Rick and Sue Loomis spent 2 1/2 years in the Peace Corps in West Africa, so they were accustomed to cooking without electricity or gas. Courtesy of Rick and Sue Loomis “We had a friend up there who owned an old train depot,” she said. “We owned an 1840s farmhouse.
We were talking about doing it over and wanting a cookstove in the kitchen area, and it was basically, ‘Have I got a deal for you!’ She offered us this cookstove for 50 bucks. And we thought, ‘Why not?'” Incidentally, that was the only old train depot we heard about, but “old barns out back,” Uncle Henry’s, Facebook Marketplace and eBay surface often as suppliers of old stoves. When the Loomises moved to the 1855 farmhouse in Yarmouth where they still live, the stove — which Loomis restored with much blood, sweat and steel wool — came with them.
Some 40 years ago, their Fortress Crawford had a shot at fame. The director of a Maxwell House coffee commercial that was supposed to be set in a lighthouse heard about it. He came to their home to check it out, to see if it would work as a set piece for the commercial.
“He was, I guess, your typical commercial-maker kind of person,” Sue Loomis said. “He was tall and thin and had boots on, black pants, a black turtleneck, long hair.” “He was going around our kitchen making rectangles with his fingers the way cinematographers do,” Rick Loomis chimed in.
In the end, the stove wasn’t cast (excuse the lame pun). But no matter. To explain what the stove means to them, Hollywood moment or no, Sue Loomis quoted the couple’s daughter-in-law: “This stove is really the heart of the house.
” David Erickson, of Erickson’s Antique Stoves, found this Spears hotel range in disrepair and in many pieces on Clapboard Island, a private island off of the coast of Falmouth. It originally belonged to a Philadelphia railroad executive who summered in Maine in the 1890s. “In the kitchen he had one of the most spectacular double ovens,” Erickson said, “the absolute top, the Duesenberg of coal-burning kitchen ranges.
” Courtesy of David Erickson WHAT YA GOT COOKIN’? The Loomises cook on their stove on occasion, mostly to sauté, boil water or keep dinner warm — unless the power goes out. “Then I can cook just about anything on it,” Sue Loomis said. The oven, though, is a little tricky.
“I used to kid my husband when I first started really using it,” she said. “I tried baking in it, and it’s really difficult to regulate the heat. I told him I was treating him like a god because I was serving him burnt offerings.
” Kelly Schwierzke got her Queen Atlantic stove from her grandmother. “It can make a pretty mean pizza and will roast you right out of the house at the same time,” Schwierzke wrote in an email. Courtesy of Kelly Schwierzke More than a few people observed that wood-burning stoves work great for biscuits and pizza.
But that is very much for starters. Like Tartaro-O’Donnell, Baldwin resident Kelly Schwierzke inherited her oven, a Queen Atlantic wood stove circa 1900, from her grandmother. And like Loomis, Schwierzke mentions its singular usefulness during power outages.
“When we had the ice storm in ’98, she was cooking everything on that stove,” Schwierzke said of her grandmother. “Anything you could imagine. As everything was thawing out, she was cooking it to make sure it didn’t go to waste.
” If you knew Alan Smart, a retired welder who lives in Lincoln, you would not be surprised that beans are the very first thing he mentions cooking on his 1902 Glenwood double oven, dual exhaust No. 14 wood-burning stove. Smart is locally famous for his baked beans, which he makes for church events, veterans clubs, Elks lodges, funerals and his annual family reunion.
In the summertime, he makes classic Maine bean hole beans, but in the cold weather, he deploys his stove. “I can make beans in this wood cookstove that tastes almost the same as a bean hole bean,” he said. That’s hardly its only culinary achievement.
Just that morning, the stove provided breakfast for Smart and his wife: eggs, bacon, biscuits with Amish butter and coffee. “First thing we get up in the morning, I can build a fire and have coffee perking faster than on a gas range,” Smart said. He has a gas range, too, though, a Chambers model C from 1952, “which was the year I was born,” Smart said.
Both occupy his large farmhouse kitchen, the Glenwood used in the winter when — a bonus — it keeps the household toasty warm, the Chambers used in warmer weather when it’s too hot for a fire. The Smarts own other old stoves, too, in the barn out back, scattered around family camps, picked up in Maine and several other states where Smart was working at the time. When Smart rattles off their brands and histories, it’s hard to keep track.
Does he consider himself a collector of old stoves? “A hoarder,” Smart laughs, “of junk. That’s how my friends would put it.” Vintage gas stoves are similarly versatile.
Higgins likes what happens when she pairs her beloved Romertopf clay baker with her beloved Chambers oven. The oven capably handles the high heat that the Romertopf demands, while its small size concentrates the flavor of Romertopf meals like lamb and white beans, or chicken breast with sherry and Canadian bacon. “It’s just a beautiful result,” Higgins said.
Asked what he cooks in his oven, Schwartz emailed back with a question of his own: “Do you remember the TV show ‘Kate & Allie’? At one point Jane Curtin is taking a quilt down to the basement washer. Susan Saint James says, ‘You can’t wash that in the machine.’ Curtain answers, ‘I could wash an egg in that machine.
’ “That’s how I feel about our old stove,” Schwartz wrote. “It may be smaller than a Wolf or the Aga, it may be more rudimentary, but I can make anything in that machine.” Pamela Higgins, a retired librarian, got the cookbook “Susie’s New Stove” when she was just 8 years old.
The cookbook, which she keeps in her kitchen, was published in 1950, making it one year older than her 1951 vintage Chambers stove. Brianna Soukup/Portland Press Herald MULTIPURPOSE Cooking is just the half of it. Owners of old stoves variously mentioned their usefulness drying clothes, heating and humidifying houses, keeping food and dinner plates warm, likewise keeping cats and humans warm in drafty old Maine houses.
Tartaro-O’Donnell never once thought about leaving her stove behind in New York when she moved to Maine, although it took three movers — or was it four? — to heft it onto into the moving truck. After some 70 years with the stove, she knows its every nook and cranny. “That’s part of my heritage,” she said.
“Listen, I’m Italian, I’m first generation. Food is love and it’s the part of the house. “When I see these new stoves,” she started to say, then paused.
“Like, a dear friend of mine just had a new home built, and she bought this high-tech stove, and I just said, ‘Wow! You need a manual to even turn this thing on.'” 10th Annual Falmouth Kitchen Tour WHAT: A self-guided tour of eight kitchens in Falmouth, including the Higgins’ kitchen, complete with its vintage 1951 Chambers stove. Each kitchen will feature a culinary guest — a chef/baker, cookbook author or food entrepreneur.
WHEN: 10 a.m.-4 p.
m. May 10, WHERE: Before you begin, pick up your tour book at the Moss Gallery, 251 U.S.
Route 1, Falmouth. TICKETS AND INFO: $30 by April 30, $40 after. Online sales only, at falmouthkitchentour.
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