http://passionforthepast.blogspot.com/2014/03/a-s ... higan.html
The Stove Capitol of the World - - - - - -
(The following comes from author Bill Loomis. It is a condensed version of a special article he wrote for the Detroit News in 2015):
Long before Detroit became known as the Motor City, it was world famous for another iron product: stoves. In the 19th century, Detroit's four large stove manufacturers produced more than ten percent of stoves sold around the globe. Indeed, Detroit became known as the "Stove Capital of the World."
In the 1840s Detroit became a western center for iron, copper, brass and other metal foundries. Early firms included the Fulton Iron and Engine Works; Cowie, Hodge and Co.; Buhl Iron Works; Detroit Forge, and Barclay Iron Works.
The largest of them all was the Detroit Locomotive Works, on Larned at Third , where they made a variety of things, including locomotives. However, most of these early companies were small. They cast parts and built engines for the steamship industry, later for the railroads, and other miscellaneous applications such as boilers, gears, parts for carriage makers, and agriculture. By the Civil War some firms, such as Fulton Iron, were casting artillery pieces.
Until the Civil War, Detroiters and most Americans still heated their homes and cooked meals using an open hearth. While there was a romantic ideal of the hearth as the spiritual center of the home, the cook had little control over the heat of a hearth, and rudimentary cooking tools left women with limited choices for meals. In addition, cooking on a hearth was exhausting, smoky, and dangerous.
Putting all that aside, the growing problem with hearths was their inefficiency and fuel cost: They burned 10 times the amount of wood as a wood-burning stove. A cookbook from 1803, "The Frugal Housewife," discussed this problem: "All the culinary processes were carried on with one immense open grate, burning as much fuel in one day as might do the same work for ten. The cook and the furniture of the kitchen get a proportion of this heat, the articles to be dressed another portion, but by far the greatest quantity goes up the chimney."
And in Detroit wood was getting expensive. If you lived on land with trees, most likely the menfolk and the work horse spent winters hauling sledges loaded with cord wood for the hearth. If you did not, fuel became an issue.
In the decade of the 1830s, roughly 2,000 Detroiters burned 200,000 cords of wood in their hearths a year. As the city expanded, more trees were cleared for land while more people were still arriving. This meant the cord wood had to be carted farther and farther from woods to market, raising the price. The areas around Detroit had been cleared and cord wood was now shipped from the north or Canada.
The first recorded heating stoves in Detroit were shipped from Pittsburgh in 1797 and sent to the military's Garrison Station.
Jeremiah Dwyer saved $3,000 and with a bank loan got started on his own iron foundry to make stoves. Along with his brother James, he took over a manufacturer that was facing bankruptcy. As Dwyer stated: "The firm had been trying to make reapers and stoves. Never a more unwise match. The sort of iron used for reapers is exactly the opposite the kind for stoves."
He established his stove manufacturing company, the Detroit Stove Works, in 1861, on the corner of Mount Elliott and Wight, near the Detroit River. There, he built his first simple, four-burner cook stove, which he called "The Defiance."
In 1866 the Detroit Stove Works received outside capitalization and Dwyer expanded the operation, moving to a new facility on East Jefferson. The business now employed 90 men and was putting out 30 to 40 stoves a day.
Due to health problems, Dwyer sold his interest in the Detroit Stove Works and spent a year resting in the South. He returned in 1871 and joined the newly formed Michigan Stove Company as operational manager. Eventually he became president.
Since the heating stoves were to sit in parlors and bedrooms, they could not be big, black iron monstrosities but needed to be tasteful, like pieces of furniture.
Manufacturers and their designers relied on cast iron's ease of bas-relief decoration. Simple decoration also served another purpose: it disguised some of the imperfections unavoidable when casting stove plate. Stove patternmakers selected designs to capture the spirit of the times, scenes like the opening of the Erie Canal or the Battle of Lake Erie. There were Egyptian themes, patriotic scenes, knights of the round table and more. They gave the stoves exotic names, such as the "Antelope," "Occident," and "The Golden Age."
Detroit stove manufacturers displayed their stoves during the 1869 Michigan State Fair, where 30,000 people passed through the Domestic Hall to see rows of working stoves, whose combined heat made the exhibit unbearable for most.
American housewives and families were proud of their kitchen stoves. A hearth may have been homey, but the kitchen stove provided real cooking options. Nationally known cookbook author, columnist and cooking instructor Maria Parola described the functionality of a stove from the 1890s: "With proper management of dampers, one ordinary-sized coal-hood of anthracite coal will, for twenty-four hours, keep the stove running, keep seventeen gallons of water hot at all hours, bake pies and puddings in the warm closet, heat flat-irons under the back cover, boil tea-kettle and one pot under the front cover, bake bread in the oven, and cook a turkey in the tin roaster in front."
Cookbooks soon changed as women could now regulate heat in ovens and on ranges. New recipes for soufflés, tarts, pies and cakes appeared that would have been difficult to impossible in a hearth.
Detroit stove companies began to merge at the turn of the 20th century, and people turned away from cast iron stoves for steel enameled stoves. Automation was being introduced which meant the end of the 19th century skilled trade groups, such as the molders and mounters. And the excitement of automobile manufacturing had replaced the public's interest in cast iron stoves.
If that article means a kitchen range,.... mine would be a melted pile of iron if a ran close to 50 pounds through it in a day !!! 
