Henry F. Middleton, a New York antiquarian, has found at the home of Jason Aldrich, a farmer living near East Cornwall, Conn., the old box stove which was the innocent cause of Litchfield's celebrated stove war in the Sabbath day house on Litchfield green during the ministry of the Rev. Lyman Beecher, and has carried it off to New York in trimuph. He had been in search of the stove for several months. Aldrich had owned the stove for years, having bought it at an auction.
There are still a number of Litchfield people who remember the story of the stove war. Lyman Beecher, the Congregationalist, preached in the Sabbath day house from 1810 to 1826, and it was during his term of service there that the trouble occurred. Henry Ward Beecher, his son, was born in this historic town, and more than once referred to the matter in his after life as a good story illustrative of the difficulties encountered by progressive church people in the early days.
The box stove had already invaded the sacred but frigid precincts of a number of churches in Connecticut. Some of the most influential persons among the Litchfield Congregationalists determined to get one to see what it would do toward tempering the frost fingered gales which howl in the winter across the bleak Litchfield hills. An unexpectedly determined opposition was immediately encountered in the church, however, and a fierce war was waged against the stove, the principal grounds for which were that it would desecrate the house of God; that it would promote disease by rendering the members of the congregation unduly sensitive to cold, and, still further, that the auditors ought to be so imbued with the fire and glow of religion as to pass unnoticed the rigors of winter during the delivery by the preacher of the two long midday discourses, which were then the invariable rule on Sunday.
