London has Big Ben. Paris has the Eiffel Tower. Egypt has the pyramids. And Detroit once had the world's largest stove.

Well, largest stove replica, if you want to be technical about it.

It was 25 feet high, 30 feet long and 20 feet across - about the size of a two-story house. At the time it was unveiled in 1893, it was said to weigh in at about 20 tons, though later - and likely more accurate - estimates pegged it at a mere 15 tons. Unlike an actual stove, however, this one was made of wood - a fact that is both ironic considering the fuel that fed its smaller counterparts and tragically relevant to the end of our story.

But why a stove? And why Detroit? Well, before the Motor City put the world on wheels, it kept it warm during its reign as the “Stove Capital of the World.”

Stoves stoke Detroit’s growth

In the 1870s and 1880s, stoves were Detroit's leading industry, and the city was responsible for producing more than 10 percent of the world’s stoves. This was due in no small part to the abundance of iron ore in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and the ease of transporting it on the Great Lakes, especially following the opening of the Soo Locks in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., in 1855. (Iron ore is used to make steel and iron, required at the time for stoves.)

At the same time, stoves were a relatively new thing in America, not fully replacing the hearth as a source of cooking and warmth until after the Civil War. Indeed, they had become the country’s “must-have” innovation in the late 19th century. At the same time, the nation's Western Plains were being developed, and as families went west, they needed stoves to heat their homes and cook. Coupled with the fact that a giant, heavy stove was not something easy to move then - or now, for that matter - Detroit's stove companies were baking up incredible profits.

Like with cars, Detroit was home to a "big three" of stove manufacturers: the Detroit Stove Works, the Peninsular Stove Co., and the Michigan Stove Co., which claimed to be the biggest stovemaker in the world, pumping out more than 75,000 of ’em a year and consumed 65 tons or iron a day at its factory at East Jefferson and Adair Street, where it employed 1,400 people. The Michigan Stove Co. sold its wares under several brand names, including - relevant to our shockingly sizable stove here - Garland.

It’s worth noting that, though early stoves were black, blocky, bland boxes of iron, the stoves being produced in Detroit during this era were treated like decorative, ornate pieces of furniture. Where today, you might have a rather plain black-and-stainless-steel model named the Samsung NV51K7770SG, the Michigan Stove Co. produced “the Defiance.” The Detroit Vapor Stove Co. made the "Blue Star." The Art Stove Co. offered the "Laurel." These stoves had elaborate designs with floral or scroll motifs and were often plated in nickel and brass. The Detroit Stove Works alone offered more than 800 models to choose from - and every other major manufacturer had hundreds of designs of their own.

It is also important to appreciate the work that went into producing each of these heavy heaters. In these early days, stove-making was a backbreaking process and mostly done by hand. The stoves’ intricate patterns had to be molded, first into wax, then plaster or clay. Then they were carved into wood, onto which wax was pressed to form the molds for the plaster cast. Finally, from there, the iron molds were made. To make the actual stove, a “molder” would then pour molten iron into molds from ladles that weighed some 90 pounds when full. Did we mention it was piping hot molten metal? Once cooled, then everything had to be polished and painted and adorned with the decorative metals and knobs. Unlike Henry Ford’s assembly line process that sped up production and led to factories pumping out automobiles at a rapid clip, stove-making was a time-consuming and detailed process - especially when you were crafting works of warmth-generating art. The skills used in casting and machining parts for stoves would come in handy when Detroit tried its hands at making cars instead.

Prices for a Garland in those days ranged (pun intended) from $10 to $70, or about $370 to $2,600 in 2024 valuation, when adjusted for inflation.

Go big stove or go home on the world’s biggest stage

George H. Barbour, Michigan Stove Co.'s vice president, was appointed to the national commission for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Also known as the Chicago World's Fair, the spectacle was held in Chicago’s Jackson Park from May 5 to Oct. 31, 1893. It was reported that some 27 million people attended over its nearly six-month run.

Given Barbour’s role and the fair's drawing power, it’s little surprise that Michigan Stove decided to host an exhibit, and on this grand stage, bigger was definitely better. In 1892, the company commissioned William J. Kemp to design a gargantuan replica of one of its Garland stoves as a publicity stunt. Because casting it in iron would have been both expensive and unfathomably heavy (and likely to crush the train cars needed to transport it to Chicago), the decision was made to make this showstopper out of wood. The chief sculptor and foreman of the carpentry crew that would build it was Declan Shannon, an Irish immigrant who settled in Corktown. It would be carved from white pine, laminated redwood and basswood, the latter of which is sometimes called linden and a soft, light wood that is easy to work with and a favorite of wood carvers. Later years would see it referred to as being made of oak, possibly a result of much of the original wood having been replaced over the years.

Either way, the beast would require three railroad cars to haul it nearly 300 miles to Chicago, where it was installed at the fair’s Manufacturers Building, which was equally huge, clocking in at 200 feet high and a third of a mile long. Michigan Stove Co. was said to have spent an estimated $25,000 on its exhibit, including the gigantic Garland. That’s the equivalent of about $890,000 in 2024.

"Models of all the stoves manufactured by the Michigan Stove Co. were arranged beneath the big Garland Stove, like little cast-iron babies huddled beneath a protective mother," Detroit Magazine wrote Feb. 24, 1974. "People loved it. Reporters wrote hyperbolic accounts of Detroit's contribution to the nation's industrial empire, and guests guzzled beer inside the stove's mammoth belly; salesmen, nestled between her feet, orated on the superior quality of Michigan-made stoves."

A sample of some of those “hyperbolic accounts”:

"To the World's Fair visitors, there are many attractions that do honor to Detroit and Michigan," the Detroit Free Press reported Oct. 1, 1893, "but possibly there are none more interesting from an industrial and commercial aspect than the exhibit of the Michigan Stove Co. of this city. Besides a very fine assortment of their famous Garland stoves, the company has on exhibition a mammoth stove which holds the attention of every visitor to the Manufacturers and Liberal Arts Building."

"The stove is in the shape of a range, and so large that the legs which support it form the four corners to a very large room underneath, in which are some magnificent nickel-plated baseburners and stoves of all descriptions," the Chicago Inter Ocean reported Oct. 15, 1893. "The monster range with its fine exhibit attracts crowds of people."

In addition to making headlines, it is assumed that the stove helped make sales.

After the world fair's closure, the wooden monster was sent back to Detroit, where it became a landmark and tourist attraction in front of the Michigan Stove Co.'s factory at East Jefferson Avenue and Adair Street, across from Deaconess Hospital. The factory burned in 1907, but the giant stove survived unscathed. The factory was rebuilt, and the stove remained there for the next 20 years, until the Detroit Stove Works and Michigan Stove Co. merged Dec. 1, 1927, to become the Detroit-Michigan Stove Co.. The stove was moved to the new company’s headquarters, just west of the Douglas MacArthur Bridge to Belle Isle, that same year. To facilitate the move, the legs of the stove were cut off and replaced with new ones carved by John Tabuczuk. At night, it would be bathed in spotlights. There it would remain until 1965.

Though the 19th and early 20th century would be Detroit’s stove-making heyday, even as late as 1927, Michigan still produced more than $36 million worth of stoves and ranges, the equivalent of about $625 million in 2023 dollars, when adjusted for inflation. In 1928, the stove companies still directly employed 7,500 Detroiters, and produced 250,000 stoves a year.

The rise of gas and electric ranges and the advent of central heating led to the Detroit-Michigan Stove Co. going bust in 1955. The giant stove was bought by the Welbilt Corp., but that firm would go out of business itself two years later. Schafer Bakeries then leased the stove for advertising purposes, painting “Schafer Breads” on its aging sides. Schafer was bought out by the Perfection Biscuit Co., now known as Aunt Millie’s, in 1964, bringing an end to the stove’s advertising days.

In the early 1960s, Spoon Realty Co. bought the site near the Belle Isle bridge for redevelopment. The stove, it was announced in February 1965, would need to go in order to make way for a gas station. George Wreith of Sun Oil Co. was quoted in the March 25, 1965, edition of the Detroit Free Press as saying, "Everyone wants it saved, but no one seems to know how to go about it."

There was a "fizz of protest and sorrow that erupted in thousands of Detroiters," the Detroit Free Press reported March 25, 1965, when it was announced that the massive memento of Detroit’s stove-making days would have to be moved or demolished.

Much of the credit for saving it went to Detroit Free Press columnist Mark Beltaire, who wrote about the pending travesty and urged the community to step up.

"As a youngster growing up in Detroit, the Big Stove was one of the delights of my childhood on frequent visits to Belle Isle," Beltaire later recalled in his Town Crier column in the Detroit Free Press on Nov. 8, 1972.

And step up they did, as 24 companies and agencies got involved. The stove-saving prayers had been answered; now, it just needed a new home.

It would find a taker in Walter Goodman, general manager of the Michigan State Fair. The State Fair Authority voted March 18, 1965, to accept the stove as a gift on behalf of Ira and Lionel Spoon. The trouble was, the Michigan State Fairgrounds were 8 miles away as the crow flies, and moving a 15-ton stove is not something a lot of people have experience in doing.

Tom McCormick of Three Ivory Brothers Moving, who had fond memories of the stove from his childhood, suggested to his bosses that the company pitch in. They agreed. The Don Carthage Co. lent a truck with a towing capacity of 100 tons.

"That thing's been a historical landmark as long as I can remember," Don Richards Jr. of the Don Carthage Co. told the Free Press for an April 12, 1965, article. "We thought it would be a shame to let it go for kindling wood."

The next challenge was figuring out how to free the stove from its footings in order to move it. Paul Allen, president of the Riggers & Machinery Erectors Local 575 volunteered journeymen riggers to lend their muscle and know-how.

For the third time in its then-72-year-old existence, the world's largest stove was about to be on the move.

A new home, home for the range

The effort - dubbed “the Great Stove Project” - was planned to start at 4 a.m. April 4, 1965, but was pushed back a week. The stove would finally set out on its journey to the fairgrounds at 4:16 a.m. April 11, 1965, on a Sunday in order to minimize the snarling of traffic. To avoid overpasses and low-hanging bridges, the route had it taking the scenic route, about 25 miles winging through the city instead of a straight shot north. The stove would head up Van Dyke to Nevada, hanging a left onto Nevada, to Oakland Avenue, then another left onto Oakland to McNichols (Six Mile), where it made a right onto Woodward, and then a final right into the fairgrounds. The stove would be plopped down inside the Detroit Street Railways turnaround circle off Woodward, just south of 8 Mile.

When loaded onto the flatbed, the stove rose 27 feet, 6 inches above the pavement. Some of the utility lines were as low as 19 feet. Crews from Detroit Edison Co. and Michigan Bell Telephone Co. volunteered to move them up and out of the way. Men rode on top to provide any lines a lift when necessary.

The stove was "escorted by squads of policemen, utilities men and small boys on bicycles," the Detroit Free Press reported the following day. "The 15-ton wooden fixture slipped beneath wires, squeaked around traffic signals, brushed aside tree limbs and edged around narrow corners. Red warning flags fluttered gaily. ... Sometimes, the top-heavy stove wobbled slightly."

Thousands of Detroiters came out to watch as if the stove were the lone float in a parade. Churchgoers were said to have left their sermons behind to watch, and motorists honked their horns as the wooden monster lumbered by. "Small boys, who had probably never seen a real stove like it, ran ahead of it yelling, 'Here it comes!'" the Free Press wrote.

The convoy crept along at about 5 mph and took just over nine hours to make the slow pilgrimage. There was only one mishap: A guy wire on a utility pole snapped loose and bashed in the windshield of a parked, unoccupied car.

That car owner was not the only one who wasn’t elated, however.

"A wrecking ball would have done a much faster and better job on the old stove monstrosity. What a waste of time and energy was involved in moving it to the State Fairgrounds. The relic is falling apart, and a demolition job should still be considered," read a letter signed only "Civic Pride" and published in The Detroit News on June 3, 1965.

"After looking at the old stove, moved with great fanfare from Jefferson near the Belle Isle bridge to the State Fairgrounds, I think it should be burned," a letter to the editor signed by only "J.H." read in the April 23, 1965, edition of The Detroit News. "It's an eyesore."

J.H. would get his or her wish, albeit almost half a century later.

Putting the stove on the back burner

By the 1970s, the stove began to look every bit of its 80 years.

The problem, Beltaire lamented in the Free Press on Nov. 8, 1972, was that "once the stove was in place, little attention was paid to maintaining it, partly because no funds were available. It was everybody else's baby."

After arriving at the fairgrounds, the stove "squatted awkwardly on cement pillars and grew old,” Detroit Magazine wrote Feb. 24, 1974. ”The carved bottom trim on the side facing Woodward split and fell apart; dozens of layers of blistered, peeling paint made the surface resemble dried, caked and cracked black mud. The roof sagged at crazy angles. The gate of the fence surrounding the base was open; empty wine bottles, mounds of litter, the soggy remains of a campfire lay on the trampled grass beneath the stove."

That October, some council members told the State Fair Authority to either restore it or get rid of it. The authority sent back a letter agreeing that it was an eyesore that should be "torn down and removed." On Nov. 3, 1972, the Council referred the matter to the Detroit Historical Commission to see whether it wanted the stove.

In response, the Detroit Historical Society launched the Detroit Stove Restoration Committee and commissioned a 28-page assessment report while it solicited private donations to fund a restoration. In the report, the Ann Arbor architectural firm Johnson, Johnson & Roy (JJR) gave an optimistic outlook of saving it, saying that "generally speaking, the physical condition of the stove is surprisingly good, and those components which are in advanced stages of deterioration are either retrievable or replaceable. ... Structurally, the stove is sound."

Though doable, it would not be cheap. JJR pegged the cost of saving it at between $51,000 and $105,000, with the cheaper figure relying on donated labor. That would translate to $354,000 and $728,000, respectively, in 2025 when adjusted for inflation.

A Free Press poll found that 82.6 percent of more than 1,000 respondents were in favor of saving the stove. One commenter told the paper, "We've thrown away enough of Detroit's history already."

"A lot of people take pictures of it. It's a place for people to meet. They say, 'Meet you at the Big Stove,’” Jerry Pappas, owner of the State Fair Plaza diner at the DSR turnaround, told Detroit Magazine of his iconic but beleaguered neighbor. “Everybody I see likes it, everybody wants to save it, but they don't know how.” WJR-AM announcer Paul Winter told the magazine: "I've never taken it seriously, but who does? If it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn't care. It would go without comment. It's only something that one will find here and not elsewhere, but its uniqueness doesn't bestow upon it qualities that would endear it to me. It has aesthetic merit only at the more disinteresting level of kitsch."

Lester M. Lund, then the Michigan State Fair's general manager, told the Free Press for an Aug. 25, 1974, article that the stove may have been a Detroit institution, but “the sacred cow is a white elephant."

For that year's fair, Lund hired a large construction crane to dangle an Avanti sports car over the stove to "keep the public mindful of its delicate condition," the Free Press said in the article.

After the car, Lund hung a boat. A number of promoters approached Lund about suspending things above the stove. Mother Waddles, a charity that accepted donated cars to give to low-income Detroiters, wanted to hang a Rolls Royce it was offering in a fund-raising raffle.

Unable to get it restored, Lund wanted it gone, and issued an ultimatum: It had to be moved by Nov. 1, 1974. That September, rumors began circulating that the stove could be returning back to the riverfront, with a perch next to the Roostertail nightclub and restaurant being a possibility. But no savior was found this time around.

In late October and early November 1974 - just nine years after it was hauled across the city with much fanfare to the Fairgrounds - the Detroit Historical Society started to disassemble the landmark until it could be refurbished and relocated.

The Historical Society set out to raise $50,000 - about $345,000 in 2025. An advertising campaign produced T-shirts and signs for store windows urging folks to “Save the Detroit Stove.”

Solan Weeks, director of the Detroit Historical Museum, told the Detroit Free Press for a Nov. 2, 1974, story that the stove was "our last tangible link to the stove industry - and the stove industry was as important to Detroit in the 1890s as the auto industry is today. Also, the stove is a fantastic example of the decadent art of the Victorian Period."

The Millwrights Local 1102 of the Detroit Building Trades Council provided volunteers to take it apart, and the Hurley Corp. donated a crane to disassemble it. The Monarch Wrecking Co. donated the trucks to move it to the museum’s storage warehouse at Historic Fort Wayne, where it would sit for nearly a quarter of a century and largely be forgotten. Disassembly was completed Nov. 2, 1974, just one day past Lund’s deadline.

Volunteers at Fort Wayne got to work on replacing rotten sections of wood in anticipation of a triumphant return. The Save the Stove Committee suggested an odd-shaped piece of land just east of the Renaissance Center between Christ Episcopal Church and the Detroit River that belonged to the Michigan Department of Transportation. Given the parcel's small size, MDOT had no use for the land.

But with the stove out of sight and out of mind, the more Detroiters forgot about it. Many of those who remembered it fondly were dying off. In the end, only $5,500 of the $50,000 the Detroit Historical Society had sought was raised, about $300,000 in 2025 valuation short of its goal. By 1984, only $1,053 remained in the fund.

Our story ends where it began: A fair

In 1998, the Michigan State Fair was marking its 150th anniversary, a milestone that also made it the longest continually operating state fair in the country. In the run-up to that anniversary, State Fair General Manager John Hertel set out to unveil a reconstructed and restored stove at the fairgrounds to commemorate the feat.

“So, here I was running the fair and one of the big problems of the fair was all of the history of America’s oldest state fair was missing,” Hertel told WDET-FM in 2016. After taking over the fair in 1993, he had come across an index card with a phone number and the words “The Stove” written on it. When he called the number, it was the Detroit Historical Museum’s warehouse.

“And I said, ‘Do you have the giant stove there?’ And she said, ‘Well, unfortunately we do, but it’s in piles of rubble.’ … I had eight trucks, pick-up trucks, pick up the pieces and we took them to an empty building on the fairgrounds. We literally took all these pieces that were made out of wood that had been carved in the 1890s and laid them out on the floor of this building.”

Just as they had three decades earlier, local business, community and union leaders came together to “save the stove.” Budweiser chipped in $25,000, auto dealer Hoot McInerney and contractor John Carlo $25,000, Tony Soave of City Management gave $50,000. The fair sold paving stones for the stove plaza engraved with messages of donors for $50.

In the fairgrounds warehouse on East 8 Mile, painters removed up to 20 layers of lead-based paint, and volunteers from the Michigan Carpenters Alliance Program repaired rotted sections that volunteers hadn’t gotten to decades earlier. Most of the labor and expenses were donated.

"It's not just a stove, it's the stove," Hertel told The Detroit News for a May 1, 1998, article, in explaining why he was bringing it back. "It was the most famous landmark on the east side of Detroit."

In all, the effort took three years, hundreds of thousands of dollars and some 8,000 hours of labor.

"When we rode the streetcar downtown with our parents, we'd always look for it," Marion Tobey of Clinton Township wrote in a letter published in the July 1, 1998, edition of The Detroit News. "Too much of our history is being lost. It's good to have the stove rebuilt."

But again, the Big Stove had its share of detractors.

"You gotta be kidding," Gordon McBean of Royal Oak wrote in to The Detroit News in a letter published May 11, 1998. "I thought they cremated that old eyesore years ago and spread the ashes over the Uniroyal site. Now they want to bring it back and spend money on it. Drive a stake through its heart and forget it!"

The stove would be rededicated on a grassy knoll at the Fairgrounds on Aug. 24, 1998, at a ceremony attended by Gov. John Engler.

“The tarp came off and there it was in all its magnificent glory,” Hertel told WDET-FM. “It had literally been totally reborn. Everybody was so happy about it because so much of Michigan history and Detroit history has been lost over the years.”

In its Sept. 1, 2001, edition, The Detroit News profiled James Johnson, a security guard charged with sitting in a chair next to the Garland Stove.

At 15 tons, "it seems unlikely that anyone will try and steal it," The News quipped, "but there Johnson sits, guarding it diligently." Of course, no one was really worried about gangs of giant-appliance thieves; his main job was to keep kids from trying to surmount the chain link fence around it in order to scale it.

"Nobody's tried to jump the chain," he told the paper in between mouthfuls of trail mix. "I ain't done nothing except sit here and read."

Things were looking up for both the stove and the fairgrounds.

"This is the healthiest the state fair has been since the '60s," Hertel told a news conference Aug. 1, 2000, while standing in the shadow of the Garland Stove. He estimated that 440,000 people attended the previous year's fair despite four days of heavy rain during the opening week. In the early 1990s, attendance had dropped to about 160,000. The height of the fair's popularity, in the 1960s, saw about 1 million attend.

But economic woes brought on by the Great Recession would soon change all that.

The stove’s goose is cooked

Just 11 years after the Herculean effort to restore the stove, all that work appeared to be a waste. In 2009, citing budget restraints, Gov. Jennifer Granholm shuttered the Michigan State Fair and closed the fairgrounds to the public. Detroiters still had their restored landmark, but they weren’t able to get anywhere near it. Despite no longer working for the fair, Hertel picked up the phone and tried finding someone to take the recently restored stove.

“When I found out the governor was going to close the fair I had just a few months to get on the phone and talk to different places where I thought would be appropriate places for the stove to go,” he told WDET-FM. “All of those places, that I’m not going to embarrass, all turned the stove down.”

Meanwhile, the State marketed the property to developers, which would have led to questions about where to move the stove this time.

Mother Nature took care of that problem.

About 7 p.m. Aug. 13, 2011, the giant stove was destroyed by fire, the apparent victim of a lightning strike. Given that it was secluded in the shuttered fairgrounds site and the fire happened on a Saturday night, it was likely that the monument was smoldering for a while before anyone even noticed it. Fire crews were dispatched to the site about 8 p.m. that night. Footage of the inferno was captured on video.

The stove was deemed a total loss.

"The fire just wiped it out," Kurt Weiss, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Technology Management and Budget, which was responsible for the fairgrounds property, told The Detroit News for an Aug. 16, 2011, article. "I don't know if it would even be possible to rebuild it. That's a bummer."

Even if it were possible, there was little to no interest shown in doing so. As testament to how much the stove had become a forgotten and forlorn relic of the city’s past, the news merited only a small brief in the Detroit Free Press two days later.

Pieces of the charred giant Garland were saved and are now in the collection of the Detroit Historical Society - tiny fragments of what was once the largest stove in the world.

"In the end," the Free Press quipped Aug. 21, 2011, "it became a wood burning stove."