Warm Cabin Nights Are Almost Here

It is big, beautiful and airtight. It is glazed with green enamel and shaped like a massive raindrop. Its two front doors swing open, left and right, into a spacious brick-lined firebox. Made in Denmark by the Morso stove company, it stands on four legs and weighs in at about 350 pounds.


Paul Ureneck
I bought it last weekend from a retired couple in Hingham, Mass., who have owned it since the mid-1970’s. I paid $250 and it came with the original directions.

The astonishing thing is that I owned exactly the same stove 30 years ago. It was a heat factory back then and a powerful amount of family life passed in front of it. (I tried to capture the feel and sound of it in my 2007 book, “Backcast“)

I remember its ability to hold a fire all night and keep the house warm on when the temperature dropped to well below zero. One of our dogs, Rusty, loved to sleep under it until his fur became too hot to even touch. It eased his old bones. Now this one will ease mine.

The challenge will be getting it up to the cabin. Because of snow, we can’t reach the cabin with a truck. So, we are planning to put it on a big sled and pull it up with a snowmobile. This is going to be a two- or three-man job.

Once it is inside, Paul and I are thinking that we should put it against the wall that separates the bathroom from the main living space. Right now, the small temporary stove is in the center of the living room. It would seem to make more sense to put in a place that opens the room and provides a view of the fire when the stove’s doors are open. Of course this means working the stovepipe around a bit, but we can do that with a few more lengths of pipe and some pipe elbows.