Pot Bellies and a Big Wheel Find Modern Life : An Owens Valley Stove Collector/Restorer Who Is High on His Heaters

BISHOP, Calif. —  Some homeowners do battle with termites or fungus; the Beach family household in this Owens Valley community appears to be threatened by a different sort of nuisance--rust, 12 tons of it, by Dick Beach’s estimate.

A sixth-grade teacher at the Home Street Elementary School, Beach triggered the pestilence 15 years ago when he found a decrepit three-legged miner’s stove on a hike in the White Mountains and decided to lug it home.

Extensive Collection

Since then, the former Santa Monica resident has accumulated hundreds of filthy, broken and rusted stove grates, legs, lids and bellies--a collection that occupies more space than his family’s living quarters.

“I kept seeing these old stoves while I was hiking in the mountains, and I marveled at the beautiful work,” Beach explained. “Then I realized nobody else really cared about them. If I brought them home and restored them, I’d be bringing them back from oblivion.”

Beach is not the only one gathering the remnants of the homesteaders and gold miners who carried their trusty stoves west by wagon (some of the stoves came around the Horn on ships) a century ago.

Several Other Restorers

He estimates there are 20 other people in the state--and 200 in the country--who restore old stoves. The appliances have recently become fashionable as “functional antiques,” Beach said, in the manner of roll-top desks.

Beach, 38, is ahead of the other “stovers” because he’s willing to sweat for his rust. “If you can drive to it, ride a horse to it or four-wheel-drive to it, it’s gone,” he said. “That’s where mountaineering comes in.”

When school’s out in the summer, Beach makes regular “stoving” excursions into the high mountains on both sides of the valley. He straps on a customized expedition backpack and heads for an abandoned miner’s camp he scouted on an earlier trip.

What he’s after are the segments of stoves that will complete those parts already in his collection. A stove restored by Beach is likely to have a diverse history. One part may have been found in an old train depot; another piece may have once served as decoration in someone’s lettuce patch.

The pieces of a cast-iron stove weigh a lot, and Beach said he has climbed as far as 10 miles with a 150-pound portion of stove on his back. “I’m credited with stealing every stove in Owens Valley,” he said.

Not all the stoves are “stolen”--sometimes he swaps (he once traded four cords of wood for a Pennsylvania beauty, circa 1880), and he’s well-connected with junk dealers up and down the valley. If any one of them comes into a stove, they call Beach, he said. The stove man also scavenges in ghost towns in California and Nevada; and he’s not above knocking on the front doors of farmhouses he passes and asking, “Got any old stoves?”

The pieces are stored in an extensive warehouse and workshop that has grown out of his garage. It’s a maze of shelves stacked with dusty parts, which look to the untrained eye as if they’re all from the same gigantic stove. Yet Beach said he can look at any one of the disembodied parts and know its make, year and city of origin.

It’s often cold outside this time of year in Bishop, and the hunks of metal in Beach’s warehouse were unappealingly icy to the touch on a recent afternoon. But Beach handled the pieces as if they were smooth, warm wood. With bare fingers, he rubbed away the moldy leaves and layers of dirt that had clouded the lid of a stove for generations, revealing a finely sculpted cherub.

It is this attention to ornamentation that pleases Beach. The attitude at the time they were manufactured was that stoves were monstrosities whose appearance needed to be softened with as many curlicues as the artisans could add. The stoves sold new for only $10 to $35, which was considered cheap even at that time, Beach said.

They were cast in virgin iron that came directly from the ground. The designs were created from sand casts or hand-carved wooden molds. Common motifs were dolphins, dragons and lions. Each of the thousands of stove companies in operation also had its own emblem--Home Comfort stoves sport a hearth scene; Great Majestics are known by their battleship design.

Beach estimates he has restored almost 1,000 stoves; three of them heat his own house. In the bedroom is a stove that spent its youth in a gold-mining camp in the Yukon; Beach and his wife, Rosanne, hauled it home in their four-wheel-drive Toyota, which has gone through five engines and 300,000 miles in search of antique iron.

In the family room, there’s a timber stove that, Beach speculates, once warmed guests in a mining-camp hotel. The monstrous oven burns 42-inch logs and keeps Beach and his wife and daughter amply warm throughout the Bishop winter.

The old stoves, which have been called “Victorian rocket ships” because of their generous ornamentation, were often the lone artistic objects in a rough world. They knew relentless use. Beach said he routinely finds metal strips that show where some miner had laboriously patched his stove again and again.

24-Hour Duty

“Everything revolved around the stove in the mining camps,” Beach said. “The stove burned 24 hours a day.”

Even the most elaborate stoves--those belonging to rich men who had struck gold in places like Bodie--were abandoned when they finally broke beyond repair, or when the settlers moved on. Over the years the wooden furniture and other trappings of camp life turned to dust. Only the stoves remained.

Gas stoves replaced the old cast-iron models in the ‘20s; many of the leftover Victorian ovens were melted down during World War II. By the time Beach got into the act, there weren’t many men left who could teach him what he needed to know to restore stoves. He ended up apprenticing to an 85-year-old man, the one person in Bishop who could show him how to shape cast iron.

When Beach sells a restored stove (prices range from $100 to $1,500) to heat a condo at Mammoth, or to warm a cattleman’s line shack in the valley, he has the satisfaction of knowing he’s put back into circulation an antique that may be the only one of its kind in operation.