Review by Erik Gronning
Harbor and Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710–1850

Brock Jobe, Gary R. Sullivan, and Jack O’Brien. Harbor and Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710–1850. Hanover, N.H., and London: University Press of New England, 2009. xviii + 435 pp.; numerous color and bw illus., maps, catalogue, appendix, bibliography, index. $75.00.

The earliest students of American material culture, such as Esther Singleton, George Francis Dow, Clair Franklin Luther, and William Macpherson Hornor Jr., initiated the regional analysis of American furniture. Their detailed and thoughtful examination of inventories, provenance, and furniture design has been the model for much furniture scholarship throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. When Brock Jobe completed his first regional study of American furniture with the publication of the indispensable Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast in 1993, the internet was in its infancy. Today material culture research can be performed at a speed unthinkable a mere eighteen years ago. As seen in Harbor and Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710–1850, these new technologies have permitted the analysis of material culture in a region that previously appeared too daunting to tackle, given its size and disparate communities. Even so, it took great courage and conviction of purpose by the authors to tackle the broad expanse chosen for this regional study. Here, in less than seven years of production, Jobe, Gary Sullivan, and Jack O’Brien have written an authoritative book that concisely presents the variety of furniture used throughout southeastern Massachusetts before 1850.^[1]

As defined in Harbor and Home, the southeastern Massachusetts region comprises Barnstable, Bristol, Dukes (Martha’s Vineyard), Nantucket, and Plymouth counties. Only two maps, an 1802 regional map and an 1854 map of New Bedford, are illustrated in the book. For individuals unfamiliar with the region, the lack of more detailed maps makes understanding the relation of the different towns to the coast or other communities difficult. Because this is a regional study, a simple, concise, modern map of each of the counties researched would have been of great assistance. This approach has been applied with good results in other regional studies, for example, The Best the Country Affords: Vermont Furniture, 1765–1850 by Kenneth Joel Zogry.^[2]

Jobe begins the book with an insightful discussion of the social conditions within the varying communities and how they influenced a resident’s choices between locally made furniture or imported pieces from the well-established urban centers of Boston or Newport. As might be suspected, southeastern Massachusetts furniture design is based largely on the products emanating from urban New England cabinetmaking shops. Certainly, over a period of more than a century and a half, a number of urban-trained craftsmen settled in southeastern Massachusetts, bringing their training with them. Moreover, local cabinetmakers assimilated furniture designs from urban pieces to which they were exposed. They, in turn, produced items that the local population would desire and could afford.

Although southeastern Massachusetts had its share of wealthy families, the majority of residents were lower-income farming or fishing families. Therefore, the objects that they lived with were relatively simple in design and generally crafted from indigenous woods. Few of the examples of locally made objects compare favorably with urban pieces in their level of craftsmanship, complexity of construction, or quality of woods. It is these poor economic conditions that Jobe could have delved into with greater detail, since the area’s economy explains the prevalence of simple furniture produced by local craftsmen.

Robert Blair St. George’s Wrought Covenant: Source Material for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England, 1620–1700 was a comprehensive analysis of this region’s seventeenth-century furniture. During the thirty years since its publication, several new discoveries have been made. While Harbor and Home focuses on material produced between 1710 and 1850, the inclusion of a few recently discovered late seventeenth-century objects recently discovered would have added greater breadth and depth to this book.^[3]

The furniture-making trade in southeastern Massachusetts is wonderfully analyzed in detail here through the lives of Lemuel Tobey and Simeon Doggett of Middleborough, Ebenezer Allen Jr. and Cornelius Allen of New Bedford, Abiel White of Weymouth, and Samuel Wing of Sandwich. O’Brien and Derin Bray offer a thorough scrutiny of cabinetmaking in rural eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America through the study of the surviving account books of Tobey, White, and Wing, and Wing’s surviving tools. As was often the case, few cabinetmakers could survive from selling woodwork alone; many cabinetmakers also relied on farming for financial support. Margaret Hofer, who was one of the first scholars to perform intensive research on a southeastern Massachusetts cabinetmaker, Simeon Doggett, formulated many of these initial economic analyses.^[4]

Clock making in southeastern Massachusetts, as Sullivan aptly notes, was primarily a nineteenth-century endeavor. Nearly all of the clocks present in southeastern Massachusetts before this time were imported from larger urban centers or from Europe, as in the instance of William Rotch, a Nantucket whaling merchant who owned a Dutch tall-case clock. Sullivan’s excellent chapter on clock making focuses on the Bailey family as representative of the 115 clockmakers active in southeastern Massachusetts between 1750 and 1850. Since twelve other clockmakers are discussed in the catalogue entries, the reader would have gained additional understanding of the southeastern Massachusetts clock-making community if information about these other local clockmakers were interwoven with the discussion of the Baileys. That being said, Sullivan does provide important facts on the Bailey family. An interesting discovery noted by Sullivan is the retailing of clocks not only by such clockmakers as Calvin Bailey but in almost the same number by cabinetmakers such as Abiel White. As Sullivan states, “the business of selling clocks was more complicated than often portrayed” (p. 40). It would have added greater depth to the chapter if Sullivan had probed deeper into this complex issue. It is a tantalizing taste of what still needs to be researched in postcolonial American clock production.

Harbor and Home’s catalogue entries present a broad diversity of rural- and urban-produced objects used in southeastern Massachusetts homes. It should be understood that the majority of furniture made in this region was mundane. As noted above, this was a direct result of the socioeconomic conditions of the region. The entries do not all focus, however, on the locally made pieces. Excluding the clocks, several of the catalogue entries discuss the imported urban object as the primary object and then examine the locally produced southeastern Massachusetts pieces as the ancillary objects. Unfortunately, many of the local pieces are illustrated with significantly smaller images than the urban piece. A plethora of publications already treat similar urban objects in detail; this book would have benefited if its approach were reversed and the focus was retained on local products, the ostensible subject of the book.

An exceptional example of the simpler furniture local craftsmen produced is the red-painted roundabout chair (cat. no. 5). The chair has been attributed to Plymouth County based on its provenance. However, a nearly identical roundabout chair that has been published was identified as originally belonging to a Lieutenant Benjamin Vassal (1742–1828), a Scituate, Massachusetts, cabinetmaker. It is likely that Vassal may be responsible for all of the roundabout chairs with double-cyma-shaped slats. The chair in catalogue number 5 descended in the Curtis family of Norwell, a mere five miles from Scituate.^[5]

The banner or “tombstone” text is several times too unequivocal and does not always convey the uncertainty inherent in much furniture scholarship. Catalogue number 32, for instance, discusses a drop-leaf (or “tuckaway”) table that descended through the Bonney family of Duxbury. The supposition based on the table’s provenance is that the table is therefore from Duxbury. Although the turnings are not as proportional as those found on the best Boston turnings, the possibility of the object’s being a Boston product perhaps should not be excluded. The table might better be identified as being “possibly from” Duxbury. As the research on late baroque seating furniture from Boston shows, provenance is not always the best indicator of origin.^[6]

As the adage states, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Detail images of turnings, labels, and joinery are very helpful to curators, collectors, researchers, and dealers, and although the inclusion of more illustrations would have significantly increased the cost of the publication, the limited number of detailed pictures of salient aspects of different objects in Harbor and Home is regrettable. The one section that excels in this respect is the entries on the clocks. Many entries have multiple images of the clockworks, inscriptions, fretwork, and inlay, all of which are very useful for a comparative analysis. Another impediment to the reader is that the book designer (apparently) decided to place the notes at the rear of the book, necessitating a constant flipping back and forth. The unused space on the concluding page of many of the entries underlines this poorly chosen arrangement.

Furniture-focused scholarship is intrinsically limited and depicts only a finite aspect of a society. As recent publications and exhibitions have revealed, the juxtaposition of a variety of disparate objects such as fine art, textiles, ceramics, metalware, and furniture can greatly elucidate our understanding of a community. Taken as a whole, Harbor and Home brings to light a group of furniture that has been little understood for a century. The book is successful at reemphasizing furniture scholarship’s grasp of the versatile trade and commerce present in early America and the varying quality of furniture used within a given population. While the book does not provide readers with a comprehensive study of the material culture of southeastern Massachusetts, it does present an important survey of the various cabinetmakers, clockmakers, and overall furniture traditions present in the region before the industrial revolution.

Erik Gronning
Sotheby’s