Richard Lenfestey has been collecting things since he was six years old, when he acquired a small Aladdin lamp that is still sitting on his dresser. The quantity and the quality of the things he has collected since that long-ago day staggers the imagination. A visit to Richard’s property is a truly astonishing event for anyone interested in collectibles and antiques.

Richard lives in an old schoolhouse that is, itself, something of a collectible. He moved into the schoolhouse 30 years ago, when a teacher who had formerly taught in the school bought it to preserve it from the wrecking ball and sold it to Richard for $100.

The old building was a rather small school but is a fairly large dwelling. Behind the schoolhouse is a fairly large barn. Around the school Richard has built or moved in a number of smaller buildings. Almost every available space in every building — walls, floors, and (sometimes) ceilings, as well as the grounds around and between the buildings — are crowded, heaped, and overflowing with a truly staggering assortment of wonderfully interesting collectibles. Creating an index of all the objects on that property would require months of intensive labor.

The only way for me to imagineåhow a single individual could acquire so many objects is to suppose that Richard must have added several items to his collection every day of the 30+ years that he was in the business.

The walls of many of his buildings, for example, are crowded with signs and tags — many of which are wonderfully old and are often in an astonishing state of preservation.

Remarkable Stoves
Richard’s overwhelming interest has always centered on a brand of wood-burning stoves bearing the unlikely name of Round Oak Stoves. The stoves supposedly acquired their name because they had a door sufficiently large to admit a piece of an oak saw log without any splitting.

The inventor of the stove, a man named P. D. Beckwith,
reportedly started out in the industry by building a stove for himself because he lacked the money to purchase one. Beckwith’s stove was a good one and he went on to build others, incorporating a revolutionary under-draft design of his own invention. He started his company in a place called Dowagiac, Michigan, which subsequently manufactured the stoves for almost 80 years.

Beckwith originally manufactured his stoves for railroad waiting rooms and stationmasters’ offices. He was a perfectionist who made his stoves better than any other heating device that could be bought at that time. Railroad passengers, seeing the fine stoves sitting in a railroad facility, began inquiring about how they could acquire such a thing for their own homes.

Beckwith began selling his stoves in the open marketplace, in 1872, and ultimately sold more than five million units. He became so successful that other companies began manufacturing knockoffs, which were also called Round Oak Stoves — I guess in the same way that copying machines made by Honeywell or HP are still called Xerox machines. Beckwith’s company only finally succumbed to the pressures of the modern age in 1946.

The roaring success of Round Oak Stoves was due to the quality of the workmanship and elegance of design, and because they sold for under $100, sometimes only $20 or even less.

Some people consider Round Oak Stoves to be the best all-around heating stove in the world. The stoves provide precise control over the amount of heat they produce and will burn almost any kind of wood or coal. Some of the stoves are still in daily use. Richard, for example, heats his schoolhouse and buildings with wood that he burns in Round Oak Stoves.

The stoves have become valued components of the collections of hobbyists throughout the country.

A Stove Kind of Guy
Richard said he has been interested in stoves since his earliest memories. He acquired the first stove of his own when he was 16 years old. While serving a hitch in the military, he said he was given the job of keeping the military post’s stoves and furnaces — which were still wood- and coal-burning — repaired and running.

Richard spoke of that tour of duty with affection, which caused me to wonder at the fact that in his case, at least, the military had been able to assign a person to a task that was actually appropriate to his talents and interests.

Richard has been collecting and restoring Round Oak Stoves for decades and says he has more than 100 of them, in one state of repair or another, sitting all over his property. Besides having rooms full of the stoves, Richard also has thousands of parts stacked, boxed, nailed, propped up, and running over the floors in all the rooms of the large barn he calls his workshop.

We were amused by a humorous story Richard told about lining up a number of stoves to purchase back East, flying back, renting a truck, and picking them up for the return trip. Richard said that on the way back he got two flat tires. A tire service mechanic began to jack up the truck and his jack broke. “What th’ heck you got in that truck, mister?” he asked, “Lead?”

Richard said when he showed the man his load, the mechanic responded by saying, “You better travel at night. The engine on this truck will never get this stuff over the mountains in the sunshine.”

Richard’s eyes glow when he talks about his beloved stoves. He showed us through his workshop and through the rooms full of restored stoves as a proud parent might show off beloved children to a visitor. He showed us his current project and laid his hand upon it with obvious affection.

“Beckwith made these stoves better than he needed to make them,” Richard said. “Even after 150 years, in some cases, they can still be in good shape. They were obviously built with pride. They are satisfying to work on and to restore.”

A Magnificent
Obsession
Being a collector myself, I can empathize completely with Richard’s obsession. I will never cease to be astounded, however, at how far off the end of the meter Richard’s passions and persistence have gone. During his entire adult life he seems to have absorbed himself completely in the wonderful reminders of the past that he has surrounded himself with.

As we drove away following the interview, I kept looking in my rearview mirror for final glimpses of that astonishing man and that amazing place so full of the past and so lightly touched by the hurry and bustle of our modern chrome-and-plastic society. °

Craig has been a collector for 12 years. You can reach him at gaspump@pacbell.net