I was handling the stove and I could have just walked away with the potlifter They're called lid lifters, since one uses them to lift the lids on the top of the stove. You can still get them in hardware stores --old ones-- sometimes  - that's not really the term, but you know, the handle which lifts the round thing on the stove surface, made so that the heat is dissipated because the handle is just a round spool of heavy wire Exactly so..   Inside it's just open, all the way to the bottom - there's a feed slot near the top The door at the top is for shoveling the coal in, and the circular three-triangled louver allows you to regulate the draft on top of the fire.  The fire itself burns in the potbelly portion, and there must've been some sort of grate down at the bottom of the pot.  My Baltimore heater in Jersey City had had part of the grates removed, but there was an old stove guy (Sid, son of Sam of Sam's Stove Repair, may the rest in peace) who had the replacement grates for both my Balto heater and for my Boynton kitchen range.  The grates were like very heavy rakes, with 3 sets of tines, and were turned with a removable crank to get the ash out, which fell into a drawer behind a door at the bottom of the stove.  The lower door in Hopper's stove must've had an ash pan, and you can see the sliding door that allows you to regulate the draft under the fire; more air below makes the fire burn hotter, more above slows it down.  , and an ash draw  at the bottom, plus vents and stuff, but no grate or anything in between.  Probably damaged by the heat somewhere along the line, and never replaced.

 

So I couldn't figure out how such a thing works: you just dump the coal inside and it goes to the bottom?  There isn't an intermediate grate or screen that keeps it off the stove floor, for air circulation?  And how do you start a coal fire, anyway? Kindling and paper, with a layer of coal on top; after it burns pretty well, you keep adding coal.  Too much coal too soon and the fire is smothered.    The stuff in the coal bucket right beside it sure didn't look like Kingswood MatchLight to me.  How big were the chunks of coal?  They may have been too big to use in a fairly small stove like that, but not many people would know.  The coal for my stoves was no bigger than fairly coarse gravel I'd say chunks in the 1/2" to 1" range.

 

Also saw Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's studio, decorated by the mysterious Richard Astor Chanler.   It's a work of immense human beauty, that a person could create such a sublime thing, I felt like weeping, like when I saw the mosaics of Thedosia in Ravenna for the first time.  Did she have a coal stove, too?s

 

Christopher  Ralph