Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US) usu. of people, run-down, exhausted, worn-out; injured.

1872		Pickens Co. Herald (Carrolton, AL) 22 may 3/1: [He] has heard of horses stove up, and boats stove up, and wagons stove up.
1885		C.A. Siringo Texas Cow Boy [title page] By Chas. A. Siringo, An Old Stove Up ‘Cow Puncher,’ who has spent nearly Twenty Years on the Great Western Cattle Ranges.
1931		O. Strange Law O’ The Lariat 67: Old Robbie, a cowpuncher who had got too terribly stove up in a stampede to ride again.
1934		Z.N. Hurston Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1995) 6: Ah don’t want mah chilluns all stove-up wid uh bad cold.
1956		Courier-Jrnl (Louisville, KY) 6 Jan. 37/1: One asked the other how his brother was getting along [...] ‘purty poorly; he got stove-up in a car wreck’.
1966		B. Jackson Get Your Ass in the Water (1974) 198: When you get in at night you all stiffed and stoved up.
1972		Baytown Sun (TX) 13 Aug. 4/3: Before you could say ‘stove up,’ I was crumbled over on all fours [...] left ankle turned right.
1997		Green Bay Press (WI) 3 Sept. C8/7: A boat that has been ‘stove in’ or ‘stove up’ has been rendered utterly useless, and this same sense is carried over [to] the more general landlocked use of ‘stove up’ as [...] ‘worn out’ or ‘run down’.
2007		Dly Republican-Register (Mt Carmel, IL) 30 Mar. 28/2: Once after my grandmother took a big fall down the back steps, she told me that she felt ‘all stove up, like a chimney pipe stuck in a stampede’.