My restoration shop is located in the historic Boston and Maine Railroad Depot, circa 1879, in Littleton, Massachusetts. I purchased the building in 1976 while working as an Industrial Arts teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts, with the intention of starting an adult school of fine woodworking in partnership with my mentor and professor of Woodworking from Fitchburg State Teachers College, Walter Harrod. Walter lived on Harvard Common.

In 1976, during a major energy crisis, I was faced with the challenge of heating this large building. It came with a World War II U.S. Army cannon heater from a barracks at Fort Devens. I also purchased a beautiful Victorian parlor stove through the want ads for my living quarters upstairs. After restoring it at my shop at Perkins, the music teacher saw it and fell in love with it. I purchased another for her, and the rest is history. In 1980, Edie Clark, a writer for Yankee Magazine, wrote a three-page article in the December issue after I restored her two Glenwoods.

Soon after, I became a full-time stove restorer.

I have restored stoves for the National Park Service, The Henry Ford Museum, the Albany Institute of History and Art, as well as individual customers, including Michael Strahan, Whoopi Goldberg, Ralph Lauren, Steven Tyler, and notable establishments such as Union Oyster House, The Barking Crab, and McSorley’s Ale House in New York City.

This exhibit represents my lifelong collection of some of the most beautiful, early, and unusual stoves I have ever come across.