FTV: Ode to a Monarch

     In the summer of 2025, we said ‘good bye’ to a Monarch.  No, not the royal kind.  I am talking about our trusty Monarch wood burning furnace.  They discontinued making these amazing units some time ago, but we were blessed to have had such a reliable workhorse of a heating unit for 46 winters.  Perhaps I should go back to the beginning of the story so you don’t think I have gone totally bonkers by becoming so attached to a furnace.

     It really is all my father’s fault.  Growing up during the Depression and World War II, his generation learned to make due.  If something broke, one didn’t go out and buy a new one.  The name of the game was ‘repair, fix, or improvise’ when a piece of equipment went south.  Like a lot of your parents and grandparents, he became a jack of all trades.  In our neighborhood, if someone needed a garage, the older guys like my dad would organize a building bee.  When the city of Marquette said, “Sure, we will pave your street sooner than we had planned, but only if you have the curbs and sidewalks in place,” the entire neighborhood chipped in the money and the labor to get it done.  The property on the east side of Norway Avenue was all owned by Northern Michigan University, so we only had to take care of the west side of the block.  In the middle of it all the digging and form laying was my jack of all trades father showing the younger guys the ropes.  If the kids hung around too long, we were also put to work.

     I fully believe that if my father had not gone from being an underground iron miner in Wakefield to being a civil servant for the state of Michigan (first in the State Police, then the Department of Licensing and Regulation), he would have been a mason.  One of my first detailed memories (at the age of three) is collecting rounded stones from a beach near Sand River for the fireplace dad built in the basement of our first house in Marquette.  Our second house had a brick  fireplace in the living room when it was constructed but he still built another one in the basement that divided his shop area from the rec room side.  My pre-drum playing piano lessons were paid off via him building a basement fireplace for a neighbor. 

      Dad liked building chimneys, fireplaces, foundations, and rock facades.  His masonry exploits were a close second to the carpentry projects which I fondly remember being involved in.  Anybody else remember taking part in building projects where one straightened old nails recovered from deconstructing another structure?  Our boathouse at camp was made with lumber recycled from the Picqua Furniture factory that was taken down when the new Marquette Senior High School was constructed on Fair Avenue.  The same site provided the bricks for the basement fireplace on Norway Avenue and everyone of them had the old mortar removed by yours truly.  Life with my parents never involved wasting anything that still had use.

     Because we always had a fireplace (and a cast iron woodstove to heat the camp and steel stove for the sauna), we needed wood to burn.  When we had enough for our own use, dad  would sell the extra for (wait for it) $8 a pickup truck load.  He felt bad when he raised it to $10.  My folks went out on a limb when I was in seventh grade and invested $500 in a Ludwig drum set for their drum crazy son.  On a State Trooper’s salary, that was quite a leap of faith.  Many a Saturday morning I was awakened with, “Come on boy, time to make some wood and pay for those drums.”  I do not have any hard figures to base this on, but with the amount of fire wood we handled in those years, I estimate I helped pay off that debt at least 3 or 4 times. 

     Even though I whined and complained about having my Saturdays pre-planned, I actually liked making wood.  Dad would contact whatever company was logging in the area and get permission to cut the tops left behind.  The usual agreement was, “Sure, just don’t go there during the week when they are logging,” hence our wood making Saturdays.  Even in the dead of winter, we worked out a system where dad would cut, and my brother Ron and I would haul.  We rigged up a crib on a toboggan to haul behind our trusty Ski Doo.  Once we packed a good trail, we would load it up, run it to the truck to unload, and repeat.  We got many strange looks when we would head home with the snowmobile and our sled strapped to the top of the wood pile.  In the fall or spring, we would park as close to where dad was cutting and just toss the blocks closer to the truck.  It might even take two tosses before we could load them, but it kept us busy (this was long before ATVs came on the scene).  Unloading and piling it at home came next. 

     When I bought my small house in Ontonagon in 1977, it had all electric heat.  The folks who built it wintered in Florida.  They explained the heating elements embedded in the ceiling and  said they kept the house nice and warm.  Of course, they were in Florida during the depth of winter and only used a little heat in the fall and spring.  Dad recognized the need for supplemental heat right away.  He volunteered to build a chimney so I could put a wood stove in the basement to help keep the electric costs down.  Early in the fall, the folks came and spent a few days working on the chimney while I was teaching.  We hauled an extra wood burning stove we had stashed at camp (it had proved to be too big for the camp’s original size) and I was ready before the first snow fell that winter. 

     Each room in my small house had a thermostat half way between the floor and the energy efficient seven foot ceilings.  When they kicked on the heat, my head would get very warm but my feet on the floor never felt as warm as my head.  The heat was blocked by the dining room  table so meal time required heavy socks or lined slippers.  The stove did keep the basement toasty warm, but the stairs to the basement were in the attached garage.  With no vents to the living quarters over the basement, the heat never really transferred to the floor above.  Dad could have suggested cutting some vent holes to get some heat circulating between floors, but he came up with another idea.  He did a little research and found that Henry Gagnon from Rockland installed Monarch wood furnaces.  Before the snow fell the second winter I was in the house, I had a new Monarch forced air furnace and ductwork installed and ready to go.

     If one has a wood furnace, one needs a source of wood.  I asked around and was able to find a few places I could cut my own.  The obvious difference between cutting fireplace wood and furnace wood is the volume needed for the latter.  Many people who burned wood told me they would find a logger and have them drop off a tandem trailer load of long logs.  They would cut these loads themselves and the wood would generally last two burning seasons.  With half the load piled and drying for the year, they only had to repeat the delivery process every other year.

     This made sense to me and with my large back yard, I had the room for my own wood lot.  The only drawback was getting the wood there across the neighbor’s vacant lot. This required the truck driver to pile it on my side by passing the wood under the utility lines that ran between the lots.  This arrangement worked until one delivery came after a heavy rainfall which caused the logging truck to get buried.  The ruts were repaired but that was the last ten full cord of wood I would dare to order for lack of a better place to put it.  There was a vacant lot next door to our house but both times I offered to buy it, the owner backed out.  It was time to find another source of wood.  Luckily I found someone selling cut and split wood that could be delivered next to my woodshed.  It was a little more expensive, but it also meant it could just wheelbarrowed into the shed.  This took much less time than cutting, splitting, and then hauling the wood from the back yard.  

     Every year, the cost would get bumped up a little.  The original long wood I cut cost about twenty dollars per face cord.  The cut and split wood started at forty dollars per face cord and went up five or ten dollars every few years.  When my wood source of many years announced they were going out of business, the search began for another supplier.  With the change came another round of price increases.  The last time I had to find a new vendor, the price had risen to just over $100 per face cord.  I am not complaining because the person doing the hard stuff (getting, cutting, splitting, and delivering) wouldn’t be in business if they didn’t charge enough.  When our last supplier called this spring to tell us he was also going out of business, he was actually happy to hear we would not be needing any more wood.

     As we neared the end of the 2024-25 burning season, my wife and I made the decision it was time to replace our old reliable Monarch with a gas furnace.  The unit was still in good shape, but wood ash and moisture takes a toll on a firebox so we knew it was time to start looking to the future.  The aftermath of my wife’s 2023 heart attack also played into the decision.  She found out the hot and humid streaks we get every summer take a lot out of her.  The new furnace would allow us to install central air conditioning for those stretches of brutal heat.  I was asked why we didn’t just invest in a different kind of stand alone AC, but none of these would have worked as well in our split level house.  Plus, after forty years with the same furnace, it did not make any sense to wait when both furnace and AC could be installed together.

     The first step we had to take was to contact SEMCO and arrange the gas hook up.  They had originally run the gas lines through our neighborhood 30 or more years ago, but the Monarch had a lot of years left in it so we passed.  With our neighbors on either side sporting gas meters, it didn’t figure to be too much trouble to get connected now.  With the paperwork and check sent in, the local contractor we had called made the final arrangements to install the new units.  In order to use the ductwork in place, the natural first step was to remove the Monarch.  To keep the mess down, I climbed on the roof to clean the chimney one last time (something I had done every year anyway).  I cleaned out the firebox and the chimney clean out and waited for the installation day.

     After a sustained period of drilling and banging, old reliable was parked next to the driveway ready to depart.  The contractor went over where we would like the gas meter and AC condensing unit to be placed.  He asked, “Have you heard back from SEMCO?  It would be good to have the meter bracket installed so we can run everything up to that point.”  A quick call to their Negaunee office produced nearly instantaneous results.  Before long, the SEMCO guy was here and the bracket was hung.  With all of the work SEMCO’s contractors are doing in town this summer, he was confident they would be doing our hook up sooner than later.  In a day and a half, we had everything ready.  Even though the gas line was not hooked up yet, we could at least use the AC unit this summer.

     It seems the technology used in gas appliances has come a long way.  In the summer of 1974, I was the ‘assistant manager’ of Northern Michigan University’s field studies camp located just south of Picture Rocks National Park east of Munising.  Do not let the fancy title fool you.  My old neighbor and advisor, Pat Farrell, hired me going into my senior year at NMU because none of the graduate students wanted the job.  My primary roles between class sessions were divided between mowing the grass and driving the garbage to the land fill in Wetmore during the week. On the weekends, most of the professors and students left and I became the chief cook and bottlewasher as well.  If everybody left, I had the place to myself.

     In the fall, my job was extended to the weekends of September and early October.  Various campus departments would have weekend seminars (or in some cases, social gatherings) at the field station.  It was my job to go out early Friday afternoon and open the camp up.  It was located off the grid so this meant firing up the diesel generator and lighting the pilot lights on the furnaces and water heaters.  After the group departed on Sunday, I would have to do the cleaning, take out the garbage, and shut down the aforementioned gas appliances and generator.  It did not make me nervous to constantly be lighting pilot lights but I won’t miss having to do this on the new furnace.

     One thing Henry G said when he installed the furnace back in the day was, “Be careful how you load this stove.  Your house is small (the original living area was only 26 feet by 26 feet) and if you over fill it, you will find it will get much too hot.”  The first winter, we ended up having to open the doors and windows when I over did it as the temperature in the house climbed into the 80s.  There were two big lessons we learned.  First, forget loading the firebox – it worked better to put less wood in and feed the fire more often to prevent the unintended sauna-like conditions.  The second was to not set the thermostat to the desired temperature.  If we wanted to keep the house around 68 degrees, we set the thermostat (that controlled the damper blower on the firebox) to 62.  Once we expanded the living quarters to double the original size, the furnace output matched the size of the house much better.

     We still had nearly ten face cords of ready to burn wood left over so we called Little Brothers – Friends of the Elderly.  They run a fuel assistance program and help around 100 homes heated with wood.  They arrived with a pick-up truck and large trailer and in a couple of hours, it was heading down the road.  LBFE sent a note a few days later saying, “The elderly man we delivered it to was very happy to get it.”  If you are looking for a local charity to support, look into either LBFE or the St. Vincent DePaul fuel assistance program.  Both organizations will be needing more help in these uncertain economic times.

    Will we miss the wood handling and feeding the fire during the cold months?  Maybe a little.  Old habits take a while to get out of your system.  It took a bit of work, but I always enjoyed hauling and piling wood.  The one thing I know I will not miss is trotting down to the basement at 3 a.m. during a howling blizzard to add more wood to the furnace.  The higher the wind speed, the more heat we would lose up the chimney which in turn meant feeding the fire more frequently in stormy weather.  

     On July 31, the crew from Miller Pipelines completed our hook up.  This is a longer story for another day, but it was fascinating to watch them do the necessary planning to run our service line without hitting the existing water and sewer lines.  The boring machine they employ is a long way from the days of simply digging ditches for these kinds of installations.  With our change over now complete, let me just say, “Goodbye, old Monarch, ye have served us well!”  

FTV:  An article about burning wood – who better than to represent the genre than The Crazy World of Arthur Brown?