FlameWorks Camp Story

How our camp got (re) started. 

As mentioned on the history page, our property has basically always been a camp, although the type varied.  How it came to be a private camp (semi) available to the public is a long, windy road... 

We bought our house and land nearly two decades ago and realized even before we had any real firm information or back stories that it was a unique property.  We could tell even before we had one substantiated detail about the place that it was a place meant to be shared. 

The problem was, the world we live in doesn't like risk.  Even though all of life has some element of risk, we Americans, as a culture, really like to limit risk .  And corporate culture is even more risk adverse than our culture as a whole. 

Also, we say how important it is to teach our kids to share, but we really aren't so great at it ourselves... at least most of us.  

So when we moved here, the income for the mortgage was paid for with the salary from a corporate job.  The things that were done and the way that they were done were (basically) always done in ways that conformed to our culture and blended in with the level of risk tolerance that we all are pretty much accustomed to.  In other words, we really didn't share our property except with family and close friends. 

Not long after we arrived here we really felt like we wanted to get away from things being so corporate and, to some degree, sterile.  Working for the worlds largest hearth products company there was many, many good things about that, but we really wanted to give customers choice and as this large hearth manufacturer acquired more and more of their competition, it was easier and easier to look at things in the same way that they did.  

Going out on our own with a hearth/fireplace shop really got us out of a corporate mindset and fine-tuned our perspective on many things.  As far as we know, FlameWorks (warning, OLD site!) remains the only fireplace/hearth shop focused on efficiency.  In fact, we carried the world's most efficient hearth products of every known type.  No other shop was, or probably ever will be like it.... worldwide.  

But the cost of that focus meant that we handled a VERY large variety of manufactures and were pretty much at the bottom of each manufactures priority list when things got busy.  And with the hearth industry being seasonal, things got busy pretty much every fall.  But the fall of 2005 was the start of our real challenges.  Hurricane Katrina hit in late summer and oil and gas prices started to go crazy!  The media spent a lot of time telling everyone how much traditional methods were going to cost to heat their home and to look to pellet (and to a lesser degree, wood) stoves to save money.  This was mostly great, but to a small dealer who cherry-picked from over 20 manufactures, we got further and further behind meeting the demand for products. 

By the time inventory started to come back in, the effects of the "Great Recession" were upon us.  We had customers who were waiting for our high efficiency hearth products for quite a while find out that they were being laid off.  Everything was slowing down, or even shutting down. In fact, nation-wide it is estimated that at least 40% of the hearth dealers closed up shop.  Locally, even long-standing large hearth dealers closed their doors. 

You've probably put together by now that a large part of our name is from our hearth shop name... but there is more than that.  We've always said that one of the very special things about hearth products is the way they bring people together.  We have yet to see a family gathering around a furnace or space heater, but gathering around a woodstove or fireplace is, for most people that have them, an everyday event in the "burn" season.  The same is true with camp fires!  People gather by fire.  Simple.  True for generations. 

It was only at a later time did we come across old post cards of our property in what we presume to have been from the golden days of the property.  Imagine finding POST CARDS of your house and property on the internet!  It was so surprising, in many ways, and yet, so natural and fitting in other ways.  

More to come.... building the site currently.