Our Home Comfort Range

Our Home Comfort Range by J. Marshall Porter I have often wondered how far around Appalachia the renown of the Home Comfort Range extended during the quarter century between 1905 and 1930. These kitchen stoves were manufactured by Wrought Iron Range Co., St. Louis, Missouri. I would guess that the famous, reliable stove cooked food for a great number of the rural youth who grew up 8 in that generation in most sections of the Appalachian Mountains. Many of those favored stoves can still be found in farm house kitchens, shining with their original beauty and all ready to be fired up; even though a modern electric range sits beside them. No farm housewife would sell her Home Comfort Range for love nor money. On my way home from our one-room school one September evening in 1909, (my second year in school) as I was getting the mail from our box along the country road, a pleasant, middle-aged man driving a slick team of brown mules hitched to a bolster wagon stopped and asked me, "Who lives up that lane?" "We do," I answered timidly, remembering that my father and mother had warned me against getting friendly with strangers along the roads. There were many tramps on the roads in those days. "Hop in, I'll give you a ride up," the friendly man said, and he reached down to help me up on the spring wagon seat beside him. He clucked to the mules and slapped them on the backs with the check lines and turned the team into our lane. After the drive of half a mile, all up hill, we arrived in our farm yard. "Could I interest you in a new kitchen range?" he asked Mother, who was taking the wash off the clothes line. He began untying ropes, and then lifted a canvas cover off the most beautiful stove I had ever seen. Though I was only seven years old, I still remember how mother's eyes lighted up with anticipation of having such a thing of beauty in our dingy basement kitchen. Our old stove was flat, and the lids were warped and cracked. "Pure wrought iron. You can use this stove for fifty years and never have a cracked nor warped lid," the salesman told mother. Father was not at home, and mother would not decide to buy a range that was priced at $79.00 cash, or $2.75 a month for thirty months, even though her admiration of it was almost shouting, "I'd love to have it." The salesman, whose name we later learned was Henry Ward, asked if he could arrange to make our home his headquarters for a week while he canvassed our neighborhood. Mother agreed to that. We had room for him in the house, and stalls and feed in the barn for the mules. Mr. Ward proved to be an interesting and agreeable boarder in our home. That night after supper, he and my father became very companionable, as he talked of the level lands of his native Missouri. Father had lived all his life in the hill country. It was Mr. Ward's first experience of driving such mountainous roads as we had in the eastern Appalachians. He told us that his team and wagon that had Wrought Iron Range Co. painted in large red letters on both sides of the green wagon bed, had been shipped by train from St. Louis, Missouri, along with many others to central cities of the eastern Appalachians. The mule teams were shipped in stock or cattle cars. At that time a salesman covered about a fifty mile radius of the farming and rural communities of West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Mr. Ward said it would take him about six months to cover his territory . "We never try to sell our ranges in towns or cities," he told us. Mr. Ward got up the next morning long before daylight, when my father did, and went out to the barn to curry and feed his mules and harness them. As soon as breakfast was over, he hitched the mules to the wagon and drove around in front...