It is a rather curious coincidence that three men who worked as apprentices in the little tobacco factory of the Millers and slept at night under the counters to save room rent should all have become wealthy men-two of them millionaires. This was the case with John J. Bagley, Daniel Scotten and Hiram Granger. Scotten, Granger & Lovett made their start in a small way with a capital of $1,500. They began business at 178 Randolph Street in 1856 and moved to the north side of Cadillac Square near the present Family Theater in 1862. Scotten wanted to plunge in tobacco buying just before the Civil War broke. Granger thought the venture risky and sold out to Scotten, Lovett & Company. The new firm bought until they had filled a building on Miami Avenue (Broadway) which they rented for storage, and cleared an immense profit on the subsequent rise in price. In 1882 Mr. Scotten became sole owner and built up a large business on Fort Street West.

When he died, March 3, 1899, his estate, largely invested in Detroit property and lands below Sandwich, on the Canadian side of the river, was rated at about $7,000,000.

Largely through the enterprise of these men, Detroit became one of the centers of tobacco manufacture in the country. Other firms entered the business. Cigar manufacturing was begun and the value of the manufactured product steadily increased for many years. In 1922 there were 12 large cigar factories and many small ones in Detroit, which turned out 205,000,000 cigars. At the same time 13,305,120 pounds of chewing tobacco were manufactured. The cigar business employed 12,000 persons. The world's production of tobacco was 4,500,000,000 pounds, of which the United States produced 1,600,000,000. Nine billions of cigars were manufactured and 52,000,000,000 cigarettes. Jean Nicot, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Rolfe and their associates certainly started something in their time.

CHAPTER LXXXV

DEVELOPMENT OF THE STOVE INDUSTRY

D

ETROIT is the chief center of the stove industry in
America. This industry began in a repair service

for replacing outworn and broken parts of stoves which had been manufactured chiefly in Albany and Troy, N. Y., and shipped to Detroit. One may well marvel at the lateness and the tardiness of the evolution of the stove either as a means of heating homes and buildings or as a convenience for the preparation of food.

Nobody knows when man began to warm himself by a fire or to eat cooked food, but it was many centuries before he learned to write and record his experiences in history. For more than 100 years after our forefathers landed in America the open fireplace was the sole convenience for heating homes or cooking food. The earliest record of an attempt at stovemaking is that in Alsace in France, where rude boxes of iron were used in connection with a fireplace in 1490. About the year 1735 Christopher Sower, who came from Germany, not far from Alsace, invented what was termed a jamb stove, which was merely an oven attached to a fireplace. This was made in Germantown, Pa., now absorbed into Philadelphia. Dr. Benjamin Franklin in 1744 invented a far more practical stove by boxing in a small fireplace in cast iron so that the radiation of heat would be available from the sides as well as the front. From that radical departure began the evolution of the stoves of the present day.

Pioneer settlers of America did not suffer from coal strikes, in fact they did not use coal at all. They had such a wealth of fuel in the standing forests that they destroyed millions of dollars' worth of good fuel and timber by rolling logs into vast heaps and burning them. This was heavy work, so settlers used to exchange labor by meeting together to roll these logs

into great piles to be burned. From that practice we have the term "log-rolling," which we apply in a political sense when politicians combine together for mutual aid in securing votes.

The open fireplace for 130 years was the center of every home in Detroit. It was built of stones and clay and later of stones and mortar, until bricks began to be manufactured.

THE HEART OF EVERY DETROIT HOME FOR 130 YEARS

The opening of the fireplace was commonly wide enough to permit the use of sticks of wood four feet long and the recess was about three feet deep. For the foundation of a fire a heavy hardwood log a foot or more in diameter was hauled into the house and rolled to the rear wall of the fireplace. This was termed the "back-log." Against this an armful of dry pine sticks, called kindling-wood, would be laid and lighted by use of flint, steel, tinder and shavings. When the kindling-wood

was well lighted a number of sticks of wood would be piled it and soon the flames would be leaping up the chimney and the sparks flying high in the air outside.

upon

The sticks for the main part of the fire were laid across andirons so as to permit air to find its way under the fire, thus serving the purpose of a rude grate. The andirons consisted of two upright bars or posts of ornamental iron about three feet high, standing on two feet about a foot apart and having a bar of iron attached at a right angle about six inches above the floor. The rear of this fire-bar was supported parallel to the floor of the hearth by a bend at its inner end and the sticks laid across these bars were thus supported six or eight inches above the hearth. Some of these ancient andirons were of brass and very elaborate in their ornamentation.

At

In one side of the wall of the fireplace two loop hinges of iron would be strongly imbedded in the masonry and from these loops a strong right-angled crane of iron would be hung so that it could be swung in over the fire or out into the room. the outer end of the crane a large iron hook would be attached and on the top bar between the large hook and the wall of the fireplace would be a number of smaller hooks or chains with hooks attached. These were termed "trammels." From the large hook a huge cast-iron kettle would be hung, and in it vegetables and meats were boiled and cakes and pies would be baked. From the smaller trammels meats were hung for slow roasting. Under a roasting chicken or piece of venison, pork or beef the housewife would set a pan to catch the drippings as the juices were tried out by the heat of the fire. When the roast was well under way she would use a large iron spoon to dip up the drippings from the dripping pan and pour them over the outside of the roast to keep it from scorching and drying up. This process was termed "basting." The roasting pieces were suspended on a "spit," which was a sharp-pointed, slender rod of iron on which the roast could be easily turned from time to time to insure even cooking on all sides.

At one side of the fireplace, opposite the attachment of the crane, a narrow bench, termed the "hob," would be made in

the masonry. This was for the teakettle, which was thus kept hot and out of the way of the crane and its contents. Before Chinese tea found its way into the country homes the women of the pioneer homes used to make fragrant hot drinks by infusing sassafras, peppermint, sage, wintergreen, or other aromatic leaves.

Of course a large part of the heat from the old-fashioned fireplace went up the flue, and on a cold winter day when the wind roared like thunder in the chimney and sucked away even more of the heat of the fire, one had to keep turning before the fire to keep from freezing on one side and burning on the other. Here human invention came to the rescue by the construction of the ingle-nook. This was made by building a partition out from the wall of the house on each side of the fireplace and placing a high-backed bench called a "settle” on each side of the fireplace. Grandmothers and grandfathers had as their special prerogative the right to the ingle-seat closest to the fire, where they commonly sat winter evenings smoking their clay pipes and spitting accurately into the fire while they told wonderful stories of adventures with Indians and fairy tales to the children clustered about their knees.

At 9 o'clock when the curfew bell would strike, the night watch would call out sonorously: "Nine o'the clock and all's well; curfew." The family would then rise and prepare for bed. "Curfew" is an adaptation of two French words: "Couvre feu," meaning cover the fire. The head of the house would take the fire shovel and push the glowing coals against the back-log and then cover them with ashes to retard combustion and insure the keeping of the fire alive through the night. Making a fire without matches was no trifling task on a bitter winter morning, as most Boy Scouts will know,

Stoves began coming to Detroit from the East as soon as the Erie Canal was opened in 1825. A few had arrived before that time. The earliest stoves were mere iron boxes made by Conant or Woolson, of Brandon, Vt. For ovens they had a detachable sheet-iron box with a hinged door made to be set on top of the stove, but these were not very satisfactory.