Please HELP with a mystery about an odd painting: Who Is Benjamin Stove?

I got caught up in this interesting story from a young Tampa, Florida dude. He went home to Iowa for the holidays and has kind of a gripping and well written story he's posted on the Internet in the last few days.

It's all about this old painting that looks oddly like crop circles or the chemical signature for ethanol. The painting may be as old as 1913, but he's not sure. He's on a quest to find out more about the painter, whom he believes may be the grandmother of a man named Benjamin Stove, as well as the circumstances surrounding Mr. Stove's life.

The blogger's name is Tucker Darby, and this is the link to his web site. Enjoy (and help, if you can, especially if you're from Iowa or Tampa, or know something about painting or chemistry or radiology)!!!!

http://www.whoisbenjaminstove.com/about.html (Tucker Darby's home page)

http://www.whoisbenjaminstove.com/2006/01/three_french_hens.html (The beginning of the odyssey...)

Memo to self: Don't try to wake up at 6 AM for the Alito debacle tomorrow. It's boring and we know what the result will be...

I read the site...quite interesting story.

Label me a pessimist, but I can't decide if I believe it or not. I think I believed it until the Dr Martinez note...too convenient.

However, to be on the safe side, I looked up Benjamin Stove in the Iowa Courts records and found nothing. Nothing for anyone with the last name of Stove at all.

I have a friend that grew up in Newton. I will ask her and see if she has any recollection of a Stove family that talked to aliens!

I haven't checked the site since my original post.

It is a captivating painting and an odd story. What would be his motivation for posting a fabricated story?

(This on the week that author James Frey was "outed" (?) as fabricating his own story for "A Million Little Pieces.")

Thursday Jan. 12 after he claimed he did some research in Sarasota, Florida.

"So today was my day off, but did I stumble out of bed at noon, watch mindless talk shows and finally change out of my pajama pants at dusk? Heck no!

While in Sarasota county, I also went down to Venice at the advice of another friend, and checked out their library, which has a pretty awesome genealogy section. I was able to find out a couple more little tidbits that ended up leading to some more answers, since they helped me formulate some better questions to ask other Newton residents I've tracked down. Some facts I've learned:

Benjamin Stove was indeed raised by his grandparents, as speculated by doomcrayon.
Ben's parents were both killed in some sort of fire that started on the Stove family property in 1961.
Benjamin had a sister named Elizabeth, who was 2 years younger than him.
Benjamin graduated from my high school in 1976.
Additionally, there seems to be a consensus from several first-hand sources that at some point in the mid-1980s, a scarecrow on the Stoves' farm was decapitated and hung upside down from a tree on their property, although no one can seem to pin down an exact date or who may have done this."

Editor's note: Where can he be going with this? Is it a marketing ploy? A phony site? Who knows.