Rick Gloe at work in his Windsor shop.
With the weather these days, most of us just want to be warm, and who cares how? Radiator or forced air — it’s all good. But home heat was once an occasion for functional art. Antique wood stoves are more than just a way to heat a space. They are functional odes to craftsmanship, and Rick Gloe of Windsor is keeping the tradition alive.
Gloe has created for himself an unlikely career in the restoration of antique stoves as owner of Madison Stove Works. He has about 50 restored stoves for sale in his shop and “another 200 or 300 sitting in a barn,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve been doing it awhile. It’s my sickness.”
Some burned coal. Some burned wood. Most are rust buckets. He specializes in ornate wood stoves meant for heating. “I’ve had some that were pre-Civil War,” Gloe says. Currently he’s also working on restoring an 1899 cook stove.
Gloe’s restoration took this Art Garland stove from rust bucket to work of art.
Many different models came from foundries all over the country. “Back in the day, there was a foundry in every little town. They needed stoves and they were ridiculously cheap back then,” says Gloe. “A fancy stove was 35 bucks.”
Before 2008, Gloe says, many of his customers didn’t care if the stoves worked or not. “They were just buying them for a house ornament,” says Gloe. Now, more are using them for heat.
A native of Nebraska, Gloe went to high school in Waunakee, completed his education in “the school of very, very hard knocks,” and then worked in construction. Then, in the early 1970s, he had an epiphany.
“I saw a stove in front of someone’s house that he was using for a mailbox stand,” Gloe recalls. “I thought, ‘Is that ever sharp!’ With the scroll [design] and all, it was a piece of art. I got interested and went from there.”
His finished pieces are like jewels from another era. The deep black of the cast iron and the embossed designs contrast with polished nickel-plated ornament.
When a stove comes in for work, most need “new barrels or jackets — that’s the main body of the stove,” says Gloe.
Every restoration starts with disassembly. Then Gloe scopes out what needs to be done, paying special attention to cracks that may need welding. That’s followed by sandblasting, for rust; welding, to address cracks; and sandblasting again, to disguise welds. Paint comes next, using “a high quality heat paint. In the old days, they used stove polish,” says Gloe. Then trim pieces are polished. Usually, Gloe sends trim pieces out for re-plating in nickel, brass or copper. Then it’s time to put the whole stove back together again.
Sometimes, though, he has to patch up an incomplete stove. If he doesn’t have the missing part, there are other folks like him — stovers — who may. “If I can’t find a piece here, I’ll call a couple of them. If not, then we try to fit it with something that will match that era of stove.”
Plated, ornamental top pieces, called finials, are often missing. Gloe says people would take them off to “put a pot of water up there, and they just never got put back on the stove.”
Sometimes a part has to be borrowed and sent to Tomahawk Foundry in Rice Lake to be duplicated. The piece to be copied is packed into wet sand — the process is called “green sand casting” — and a mold is made to receive molten metal. Still, it’s a bit of a guessing game. Because the metal shrinks as it cures, the mold is made larger to accommodate that shrinkage. “You’re never right on, so then you have to grind it down some more to make it fit,” Gloe says.
“In fact, if a guy was going to claim his labor on some of these things it would be 5 cents an hour,” says Gloe. “But it is fun once they’re all done. Look at it. Saved another one.”
Gloe is in the shop weekdays and Saturdays from 6 a.m. to about 3:30 p.m. with a break for lunch, and Sundays too, starting about 10:30 a.m.
Madison Stove Works
6474 Lake Road, Windsor; 608-516-0890; madisonstoveworks.com
