Early American Furniture: Its Making, Its Meaning, Its Pleasures

Demos, John

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Early American Furniture: Its Making, Its Meaning, Its Pleasures

John Demos

Description: Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk...

Becoming America: Highlights from the Jonathan and Karin Fielding Collection of Folk Art

~If only antique furniture could talk, what would it tell us? For a generation and more, scholars of material culture have worked hard to create such talk. In this they are joined by collectors like Jonathan and Karin Fielding and antiques dealers like David Wheatcroft, a chief source for the Fieldings and an interview contributor to this volume. The result is,...

Author

John Demos

PublisherYale University Press

Copyright© 2020 The Huntington Library, Art
Museum, and Botanical Gardens

Related print edition pages: pp.55-83

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00280.004

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22044

Chapter subject tags:Folk artDecorative arts, Early AmericanWindsor chairs

Early American Furniture: Its Making, Its Meaning, Its Pleasures

JOHN DEMOS

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Chair, ca. 1690–1700
New London, Connecticut, or Long Island
Maple, ash, rush, and black paint
41½ × 26¾ × 20½ in.
L2015.41.107

If only antique furniture could talk, what would it tell us? For a generation and more, scholars of material culture have worked hard to create such talk. In this they are joined by collectors like Jonathan and Karin Fielding and antiques dealers like David Wheatcroft, a chief source for the Fieldings and an interview contributor to this volume. The result is, indeed, a sort of conversation. Though ostensibly one-way, it nonetheless feels real. When we ask the right questions, the furniture answers. Its response is helped along by various kinds of documentation from the period—account books, estate inventories, occasionally a diary or a piece of personal correspondence.

The questions we could ask of any particular piece of furniture are relatively straightforward: How was it made? When, where, and by whom? How was it used? What did it mean over time, in the minds, hearts, and lives of its makers and users? How has it survived the passage of centuries? Finally, how is it meaningful to us today?

MAKING

We must start by acknowledging the factors of time and space. The core of the Fielding Collection dates from the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, with provenance in the northeastern part of what would become the United States. Its focus, with some important exceptions, is early New England.

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Corner Chair
Eighteenth century
Eastern Massachusetts or Rhode Island
Maple, rush, and red varnish
31 × 27 × 25 in.
2016.25.62

Even this degree of narrowing, of specifying, leaves much room for change and difference. Between, say, 1670 and 1830, furniture making passed through a sequence of style periods: Jacobean (1660–1700), William and Mary (1690–1740), Queen Anne (1730–70), Chippendale (1760–1800), Federal (including Hepplewhite and Sheraton, 1790–1830), and Empire (1820–50), to name the leading, if somewhat old-fashioned, categories. The variance between them is large. A tall, black-painted, bannister-back chair from the William and Mary period, to take just one example, bears little resemblance to its angular, colorful, Sheraton counterpart (except, of course, that both served as seating).

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Banister-Back Side Chair, ca. 1710–25
Boston or North Shore, Massachusetts
Maple and black paint
47 × 19½ × 21 in.
2016.25.66

There is also some crosscutting between “high-style,” “country,” and “primitive.” This trio corresponds very roughly to what we now call class difference, upper, middle, and lower; in short, they reflect different levels of wealth and social rank. Another kind of crosscut must also be mentioned: location, urban versus rural. The highest of the high-style would have appeared mainly in the households of affluent city dwellers (in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia), the most basic of the primitive among simple folk in the hinterland. The majority of the Fielding Collection qualifies as country, while occasionally (since these boundaries somewhat overlap) pushing toward high-style. (Antiques dealers might collapse the two by referring to “high country.”) The term country does not mean of lesser interest or value—or beauty. To the contrary, some of the finest of all early American furniture is country through and through.

The men (invariably men) who made such furniture were well-established artisans—woodworkers, residents of mid-sized towns (Salem or Northampton, in Massachusetts; Hartford, in Connecticut; Portsmouth, in New Hampshire), and likely to be prominent in local affairs. They kept what they called a “shop” as the locus of their production—a room attached to the home, or sometimes a small outbuilding nearby. Wherever found, it was a busy, cluttered place, full of hand tools, furniture parts, rude containers of paint pigments and varnish, a long bench with attached vises and clamps, foot-and hand-powered lathes, and worktables scarred with the markings of the trade. It was, too, a showroom where customers would come to examine, order, and then carry off a finished product. The shop’s crew would often include a journeyman, another woodworker hired by the day, and an apprentice or two, boys learning the craft under the tutelage of the master. (Apprentices were a subcategory of servants, bound by contract for a stated period, and members of the master’s household. The master was, in every sense, their boss, and he stood in loco parentis—if he was not, in fact, their actual parent.)

Furniture making was unspecialized, low-technology work. The master was in charge of every aspect, from conception through all phases of construction to sales. In the seventeenth century he might even have had to cut the trees, trim the logs, and saw the boards—before starting actual construction. Later on, in a more developed environment, he could resort to local mills and lumber merchants for materials. In all periods, however, he would have known wood in very deep ways: its many species (oak, maple, white pine, and cherry were New England favorites), the intrinsic properties of each, its growth patterns, its subtle gradations. Wood was the very stuff of his work—and life.

He did not, however, operate in an ad hoc way; he followed habits and methods passed down from generation to generation. Many woodworkers were part of a family line: a father training and then succeeded by a son, a grandson, and so on. Within the larger community, woodworkers formed their own subgroup, which enabled them to consolidate capital and reputation, and to control training. Working separately, they nonetheless influenced each other. So it was that a town or region might evolve a distinctive style. The preferences of clients—almost all of them local—were shaped accordingly; this, too, weighed on the side of continuity. There was innovation, but only to a degree and mostly with the details.

To be sure, furniture making was not wholly shut off from outside influence. One broad current ran from city to countryside. Rural shops, aiming to please rural customers, might adapt a stylish urban form. For example, the graining painted on a chest might simulate the surface of a high-style piece in walnut or mahogany made for an urban clientele. Or another kind of paintwork might mirror a much fancier carved design.

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Description: Grain-Painted "Matteson" Blanket Chest

Grain-Painted “Matteson” Blanket Chest, ca. 1820–25
New Shaftsbury, Vermont
Pine, paint, and glass
36 × 40¾ × 18 in.
L2015.41.114

Makers and customers made decisions together and in person. Thus, when a farmer needed side chairs for his expanding family, he went directly to the shop. He expected to purchase a set of perhaps a half dozen. The shop would offer several alternatives, with a range of price and workmanship. These might be “bespoke” (commissioned) or, later on, ready-made; in the former case, the customer could exercise a degree of choice over size and style (for the back, bannisters, an urn-shaped “fiddle,” or graduated slats; for the seat, a weaving of rush or splint; for the legs, curved “Spanish” scrolled feet or turned balls). Often enough, a maker had already stockpiled a number of each of the necessary parts; what remained, then, was their assemblage. To this limited extent, furniture making was a form of mass production.

It was also seasonal. Most woodworkers, certainly those outside the cities, were part-time farmers. They grew much of their own food on land they owned and tended; they kept livestock for fieldwork, and milk, and butchering. Like their neighbors, they planted in the spring and harvested in the fall. Winter was the main time for furniture making (but also, to a lesser extent, midsummer). It was then that they created most of what became their stock-in-trade.

The work was often called joinery, and the workers themselves joiners. These age-old terms had long described a particular skill, the essential process of fastening together adjacent furniture members. The classic device was a mortise-and-tenon joint, with a tenon, or “tongue,” on one piece driven into a mortise, or slot, in another. A peg or “pin” would hold them in place. An alternative was the dovetail, in which one part is tapered (to something like a dove’s tail in shape) and fitted into a corresponding wedge-like recess.

Another important skill was turning, the shaping of wood parts by applying a cutting edge as they rotate on a lathe; its practitioners were called turners. There was also carving, especially in the earliest years. Adept use of special tools—chisels, gouges, files—might yield a three-dimensional design; flowers, vines, and compass-drawn geometric shapes were favorite motifs. But these distinctions seem to have faded over time. Most woodworkers could perform joinery, turning, and carving—all three. Carpentry and carpenter were terms of more general purpose, covering anything that involved nailed construction. This might even extend to building houses and ships— additional roles of woodworkers, at least occasionally. In sum, furniture making was just a part, albeit a central one, in a broad array of woodcraft. It is a wonder that so many did it so well.

Indeed, something more must be said of the sheer beauty created by these various methods. A chest from the shop of a skillful joiner would show its fine proportions: height, length, and width in perfect alignment. A chair, with front legs, rear posts, and topmost finials shaped by turning—each part a procession of rounded balusters, compressed balls, narrow rings, and delicate, vaselike platforms—was made to be eye-catching. A tabletop hand-planed to a surface like hard butter was lovely to touch. We sometimes imagine our forebears in centuries past as being too limited, too busy, too unaware, to appreciate fine decoration. Nothing could be further from the truth, and nothing makes the point more clearly than their furniture. They, like us, knew the pleasures of the senses, especially look and feel.

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Description: Side Chair by Gaines, John, III

ATTRIBUTED TO JOHN GAINES III (1704–1743)
Side Chair, ca. 1735–43
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Wood and rattan
41½ × 20½ × 20 in.
L2015.41.89

USING

Furniture then and now can be grouped under two broad headings defined by purpose: support, on the one hand; storage, on the other. The former includes chairs, benches, stools, tables, and bedsteads; the latter, chests, trunks, and cupboards of all kinds. Estate inventories, careful records of household possessions tabulated following an owner’s death, are especially helpful in sorting out the details of usage and terminology. Sometimes these listings went room by room. In an average case, this would mean a “keeping room” (our closest equivalent would be a living room), a parlor or “best room” (a space reserved for receiving visitors or for other, more formal, occasions), a kitchen (sometimes, but not always, present), and bedchambers (usually on an upstairs floor). The furniture was distributed accordingly.

The keeping room was the site of most everyday activities: cooking on the hearth (if there was no separate kitchen), meals, and domestic crafts (spinning, sewing, candle making, churning, among others. Hence it would certainly have had chairs and benches, a dining table, probably a worktable or two, a cupboard, and a variety of craft accoutrements (wheels, buckets, and more esoteric devices like yarn winders).

Space was always at a premium; furniture was made and arranged with that in mind. A conspicuous example was what we now call a chair-table, a hybrid form in which a table’s top could be swiveled upright and thus become a chair’s back, with a small platform underneath serving as the seat. A different kind of table, the so-called drop-leaf, held folding extensions, or leaves, on opposite sides that could be opened and supported by rotating gates, most likely at mealtimes—thus the alternate term gateleg table. Either type could be reduced in size when not in use and pushed against a wall, at rest. The middle of a keeping room was precious space, through which various furnishings would be moved in and out, depending on the activity immediately at hand.

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Description: Gate-Leg Table with Drop Leaves

Gate-Leg Table with Drop Leaves, ca. 1710–25
Boston area
Walnut and red paint
Extended: 29 × 63½ × 50 in.
Closed: 29 × 22½ × 50 in.
L2015.41.93

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Description: Gate-Leg Table with Drop Leaves, alternate view

Gate-Leg Table with Drop Leaves (alternate view), ca. 1710–25
Boston area
Walnut and red paint
Extended: 29 × 63½ × 50 in.
Closed: 29 × 22½ × 50 in.
L2015.41.93

The parlor, with its more ceremonial aspect, was a place for displaying a family’s most valuable possessions, not least its furnishings. A fine chest of drawers or a so-called press cupboard might hold pride of place, with pewter or silver plate spread out on top. Perhaps there would be some impressive seating furniture, a turned or carved settee, or what was commonly called a great chair. This last would be for the master, an armchair of large size and stately proportions. A handsome bedstead, hung with embroidered curtains, might also have its own spot in the parlor.

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Description: Chest on Chest by Dunlap, Samuel

ATTRIBUTED TO THE SHOP OF SAMUEL DUNLAP (1752–1830)
Chest on Chest, ca. 1780–1810
Southern New Hampshire
Tiger maple and brass
82½ × 43 × 23 in.
2016.25.67

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Description: Windsor Low-Back Settee Lancaster County, Pennsylvania ca

Windsor Low-Back Settee, ca. 1760–80
Lancaster County, Pennsylvania
Wood with black and green paint
30 × 81 × 24 in.
L2015.41.100

The kitchen, if there was one, was women’s space—men took no part in food preparation—and its furnishings were modest and functional. A simple chair or two (though most cooking was done standing up), a rough-hewn table on which to set platters and cookware, a cupboard in the corner: this was the likely extent of it. Upstairs rooms were used mainly for sleeping and storage, and thus had little or no daytime occupancy. Furnishings there were correspondingly sparse: barrels, trunks, and bedding. A country bed was of simple design: a frame composed of head- and footboards and a pair of side rails, with roped netting in between to hold a mattress, which in their minds was the actual “bed.”

There was, of course, more variance than this brief sketch can show. Estate inventories record a wide range in the number and quality of furnishings: from greater to fewer, from “fine” to “common.” Furniture was always a marker of rank and prosperity.

MEANING

Going further to interpret what furniture meant to its makers and users is a difficult task. We enter what is, by and large, a realm of inference, of possibilities. We can start with the obvious point that theirs was a world of hand-wrought, as opposed to machine-made, objects—of things taken from, but not entirely removed from, nature. Did a chest (a table, a chair) placed in a room evoke, at some level, the trees that supplied the material from which it was fashioned? Conversely, did trees suggest the possibility of a chest? Was there not, then, a feeling of closeness, even intimacy, between men or women and their furnishings? Perhaps this gave added meaning to ownership; to own and use was to possess in a more than ordinary sense. On a good many surviving objects we find initials—and yearn to know more. What kind of personal linkage did such inscriptions imply? Wills sometimes mention particular furnishings: a great chair bequeathed from father to son, a dower chest from mother to daughter. These legacies are the source of the word heirloom, and surely they were freighted with emotion. The deceased would live on in the things that had—in a sense both literal and figurative—supported them.

Chairs, in particular, invite thoughts of connection. They are so humanlike; they have backs, seats, arms, legs, feet. They mirror our bodies. In fact, this was clearer then—of every chair—than is the case today. (Our own chairs have such varied designs, some quite different from the traditional form.) And there is more. Consider the matter of finials, a small but significant feature of most (not all) premodern chair making. A finial is a distinctively fashioned element at the top of each of a chair’s rear posts. On some quite modest examples, it is the only part to which the maker has given special attention, most often by turning. Why is this? What makes it important? The most likely answer is the human face. Finials are positioned so as to frame the sitter’s head. And in a cultural setting where face-to-face exchange was the norm, this cannot have been coincidental. The face was the person, nothing less. Much on-paper evidence makes the same point more explicitly.

~

Slat-Back Armchair, ca. 1740
Probably New York
Wood with red and black paint
47 × 25½ × 23 in.
2016.25.65

In addition, chairs tell their own story about the power of social rank. A great chair, as mentioned previously, would express the importance of a household “head” (the husband, the father). You need to try sitting in one to appreciate this. The vertical back insists that you assume a ramrod, upright posture. Your arms push forward along those parts of the chair; if there are handholds, you must grip them. Your knees break at the seat front, legs going straight down, feet settling solidly on the floor. (No slouching.) You assume, all told, a highly authoritative pose, indeed throne-like. (A monarch’s throne was simply the greatest of all the great chairs in the realm.)

When a seventeenth-century family gathered for dinner at a long, rectangular table, a great chair would rest at one end; there sat the paterfamilias. Other seating furniture—consisting, in that earliest period, of unbacked benches and stools—would be ranged down, and “below,” on either side; these were meant for women, children, and visitors who were of lower standing—thus the context for the idiom “below the salt.” As time passed, the benches were replaced by side chairs, but the principle of center and periphery, of higher and lower, remained.

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Carver Chair, ca. 1690
Maine
Maple, ash, and red stain
45 × 26½ × 20 in.
L2015.41.98

Only when tables became circular or oval in shape—a gradual change, spanning the early and middle decades of the eighteenth century—was a different, more egalitarian, pattern established. By this point, too, chairs had become less constricting and more comfortable. A prime example was the Windsor form, with a row of spindles creating a rounded back, and a sculpted seat bottom. Drawn from English prototypes, it was soon recast in a simpler American style. Because they were inexpensive to make and appealing to all, Windsors soon became the “democratic” choice of numerous American households.

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Windsor Armchair
Rhode Island
Oak with hickory spindles
40⅛ × 21⅞ × 20⅞ in.
2016.25.71

We cannot recover the full range of such meanings for early American folk because we cannot go right inside their heads. But it seems safe to say that furniture was threaded into all parts of their thinking, values, and practice.

SURVIVAL

As the colonies achieved independence and remade themselves as a nation, furniture traveled alongside. Old was out; new was in. New, new, new: thus the cry in all quarters. Chairs, tables, chests, and many other kinds of inheritance from the centuries preceding became passé; what had once seemed stately was now stodgy. Some old pieces were simply tossed out, others consigned to attics or cellars. Still others remained in use but in a compromised condition (feet cut down, seats replaced, to remove decay; the paint surface faded and scuffed). Occasionally, one with remarkable workmanship or strong connections (to ancestors, for example) might be lovingly preserved. But these carried a flavor of the quaint, the peculiar—no longer fully embraceable. Looking back from the modern era, we can see a winnowing process here. The finest, the “best,” survived much more than the common. The antiques world of today is skewed accordingly. Great chairs are relatively abundant in collections and museums, and on the market—the seat forms of humble folk a rarity. The Fielding Collection is unusual in its focus on rural and country objects.

To be sure, the craft of woodworking continued apace. But style preferences changed dramatically. Much of the furniture made in the first decades of the new (nineteenth) century expressed a spirit of excitement, not to say exuberance. The term we give to it now is American Fancy. Color and vivid design ruled the day, consistent with the hopeful, expressive tenor of what many called “Young America.” This was especially true of “country” work, painted case pieces (boxes, trunks) most of all.

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Description: Blue Box with Oyster Shell Graining and Ivory Keyhole

Blue Box with Oyster-Shell Graining and Ivory Keyhole, ca. 1820–40
Wood, paint, ivory, and iron
6½ × 11⅞ × 7 in.
2016.25.29

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Blue Smoke-Decorated Box, ca. 1820–40
Wood, paint, and iron
5½ × 12⅜ × 6¼ in.
2016.25.37

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Description: Flat-Top Diagonally Decorated Box

Flat-Top Diagonally Decorated Box, ca. 1820–40
Wood and paint
6½ × 13 × 9⅞ in.
2016.25.33

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Decorated Box, ca. 1820–40
Wood and paint
5½ × 9⅞ × 5⅛ in.
2016.25.31

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Decorated Box, ca. 1820–40
Paris Hill, Maine
Wood, paint, and iron
5⅛ × 11⅞ × 5⅞ in.
2016.25.32

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Writing Box, ca. 1800
New England
Wood, paint, and brass
4½ × 14¾ × 11 in.
2016.25.26

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Description: Red-Spotted Box with Shallow Dome Top

Red-Spotted Box with Shallow Dome Top, ca. 1820–40
Wood, paint, and iron
5⅛ × 15 × 8 in.
2016.25.34

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Arch-Decorated Box, ca. 1820–40
Wood, paint, and iron
9 × 18⅝ × 9¼ in.
2016.25.41

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Green Dash-Decorated Box, ca. 1820–40
Wood, paint, and brass
6⅜ × 11¾ × 6¼ in.
2016.25.40

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Painted Dome-Top Box
Early nineteenth century
Possibly Vermont
Pine, paint, and nails
10½ × 29⅝ × 12 in.
2016.25.42

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Description: Decorated Document Box by North, Elijah and Elisha

ATTRIBUTED TO ELIJAH AND ELISHA NORTH
Decorated Document Box, ca. 1806–40
Stevens Plains (now Westbrook), Maine
Tin, brass, and paint
5½ × 9 × 4½ in.
2016.25.45

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Description: Painted and Decorated Dome-Top Box

Painted and Decorated Dome-Top Box, ca. 1820–30
New York State
Basswood or pine and paint
9½ × 17½ × 10½ in.
Inscription (lid): “A.D.”
L2015.41.63

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Decorated Box, ca. 1820–40
Wood, paint, iron, and wallpaper lining
6¼ × 12⅜ × 6⅜ in.
2016.25.38

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Dome-Top Trunk, ca. 1850
Maine
Wood, iron, and paint
12¾ × 28¼ × 15 in.
2016.25.69

Meanwhile, another category of furniture making—cabinetry—rose to prominence, especially in the ranks of elite society. Starting as far back as the early decades of the eighteenth century, cabinetmakers created highboys, dressing tables, and similarly elegant pieces, typically made from imported mahogany, to grace the homes of the most affluent. Indeed, many would say that cabinetmaking was the apex of woodworking craft.

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Dressing Table, ca. 1710–20
Boston area
Walnut, walnut veneer, and pine with brass hardware
30 × 33½ × 23¼ in.
L2015.41.95

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High Chest of Drawers, ca. 1720
Boston area
Maple, pine, ash, and mahogany with brass hardware
66½ × 39½ × 23 in.
L2015.41.91

Then came what we know as the Industrial Revolution, a sea change for all sorts of productive enterprise. Most furniture making moved out of traditional shops and into factories. Handmade gave way to machine-made. And the survivors from an earlier time became exactly that—survivors—and thus more “quaint” than ever.

But further twists and turns still lay ahead. The approach of the nation’s centennial—1876, one hundred years after the Declaration of Independence—birthed a substantial “Colonial Revival.” Quite suddenly, Americans began looking back on their origins with feelings of special fondness, even reverence. Furniture followed the trend—and itself nourished the trend—well into the twentieth century. Much of this Revival furniture was factory-made, with motor-driven machines creating copies of, say, an early Windsor chair or a Chippendale-style highboy. Thus a new term entered the antiques world: repro, for reproduction. A Connecticut clergyman-turned- entrepreneur named Wallace Nutting led the way there. Furniture, produced in factories organized and financed by Nutting, became the keystone of his broad-gauge campaign to re-create what he called Old American Life. As he once said, succinctly and sweepingly, “Whatever is new, is bad.” The irony is that he was making the old new again.

Even as Nutting and others pursued their Revival agenda, antiques— the Real Thing, not repros—began to spark renewed interest. By the 1920s one could speak of an “antiques market”—with auctions and dealer shops and shows proliferating. Major museums followed suit, offering “period” rooms stocked with early furniture. Old pieces emerged from attics, barns, and other sites of neglect; dusted off, scrubbed, repaired, “restored,” they entered the domain of commerce. Too often, alas, they were stripped of their original paint surfaces; buyers of that era preferred the look of “natural wood.” Scholars—more from the museum world than from academia— turned furniture history into a serious field of research. Thus well before the Second World War, antiques had claimed, and filled, their own cultural and commercial niche.

From that point on, the trend lines have followed a broadly consistent course. Market preference has zigged and zagged—what is hotly sought after in one year or decade may be “down” in the next. Values fluctuate accordingly, in response to larger economic conditions. (The Great Recession of 2007–9 hit the antiques business especially hard.) Dealers worry that their clientele is aging, without sufficient reinforcement by the young. But, for all that, no one expects a general collapse.

TODAY

This brings our story to the present, and the nagging question of why. Why do we care? What does old furniture mean to us? Surely there are complex reasons, and just as surely they vary from one individual or group to the next. Still, when an interest has spread so widely, it must have tapped some quite general set of motives.

Shall we begin by acknowledging the less attractive of these—and thus get them out of the way? The pride of acquisition, control, self-enhancement. (Most collectors would admit, if only in a whisper, to having tasted greed.) The competitive instinct. (Shall we compare?) Hoarding. (Better buy now; soon there won’t be any left.) Investment profit. (Perhaps a boom in Chippendale-style chairs is just around the corner?) Depth psychologists have gone further, positing a range of “infantile projections.” (These can be left unspecified.)

Enough. There is much else to say on the positive side. Antique furniture may be an acquired taste, but with time and experience it can come to feel irresistible. Again, there is the matter of its look—its sheer beauty. Damn! These makers, these creators, knew what they were about. Shape, surface, proportion, color: the best of them, the most skilled, had mastered all. Another point: handmade meant personal, and so, too, is our appreciation personal—that is to say, heartfelt, emotion-driven. And another: the care invested in them, the cherishing over many generations, humbles us—and, at the same time, uplifts us. And yet another: think time travel. Early furniture is a spaceship, pointed in reverse.

Finally: the pleasures, and duties, of stewardship. We do not truly own these things; they lie beyond such claims. They both precede and outlive us. We receive them from the past, preserve them as best we can, and pass them along to the future. We partake of their journey. Is this not its own reward?

John Demos, the Samuel Knight Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University, is the author of ten books on early American history and culture and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award.

I wish to thank Philip Zea, president of Historic Deerfield, Inc., and a leading authority on furniture history, for his careful, critical reading of an early draft of this essay.

The following works have been useful in the preparation of this essay. All can be recommended to readers wishing to pursue matters of furniture history in a more detailed way.

Nancy A. Smith, Old Furniture: Understanding the Craftsman’s Art; A Guide to Collection, Appreciation, and Preservation, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover, 1991), provides a useful introduction to the whole subject.

John Fiske, When Oak Was New: English Furniture & Daily Life, 1530–1700 (Ipswich, Mass.: Belmont Press, 2013), explores the English background of early American furniture making.

Jonathan L. Fairbanks et al., New England Begins, exh. cat., 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), is the catalogue for the finest of all museum exhibitions of early New England furniture and decorative arts, replete with illustrations and short and long essays by experts in the field.

Robert Tarule, The Artisan of Ipswich: Craftsmanship and Community in Colonial New England (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), offers an up-close look at the life and work of a single, highly important furniture maker in seventeenth- century Massachusetts, authored by an accomplished furniture maker in our own time.

Edward S. Cooke, Making Furniture in Preindustrial America: The Social Economy of Newtown and Woodbury, Connecticut (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), is a detailed study of furniture making in two early Connecticut towns, with emphasis on social and cultural questions as well as those about craft.

Thomas Andrew Denenberg, Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), examines the “revival” impulse in American furniture making during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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