1. Michael C. Steiner, "Regionalism in the Great Depression," Geographical Review 73, no. 4 (October 1983): 430-46; Vernon Carstensen, "The Development and Application of Regional-Sectional Concepts, 1900-1950," in Regionalism in America, edited by Merrill Jensen (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), pp. 99-118; Richard H. Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 101-5, Robert L. Dorman, Revolt of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). See also Joan Shelley Rubin, "A Convergence of Vision: Constance Rourke, Charles Sheeler, and American Art," American Quarterly 42, no. 2 (June 1990): 203. Quotation in Pells, Radical Visions and American Dreams, p. 103.

2. Howard W. Odum, "Folk and Regional Conßict as a Field of Sociological Study [1930]" and "The American Blend: Regional Diversity and National Unity [1949]," in Folk, Region, and Society: Selected Papers of Howard W. Odum, edited by Katharine Jocher et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), pp. 247, 193. Howard W. Odum and Harry Estill Moore, American Regionalism: A Cultural-Historical Approach to National Integration (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938), pp. 416-19. Howard W. Odum, "Folk Culture and Folk Society [1947]," in Jocher, ed., Folk, Region, and Society, p. 225. See also Odum and Moore, American Regionalism, pp. 15, 16, 29-31. Rupert B. Vance, "The Regional Concept as a Tool for Social Research," in Jensen, ed., Regionalism in America, p. 123.

3. Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts. 1636-1736 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 16.

4. Joyce Appleby, "Value and Society," in Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era, edited by Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 308.

5. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977), p. 40.

6. For such characterizations of folk or vernacular art, see Henry Glassie, "Folk Art," in Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, edited by Richard M. Dorson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), p. 258; Henri Focillon, "Introduction" to Art Populaire, in Robert F. Trent, Hearts and Crowns: Folk Chairs of the Connecticut Coast 1720-1840 (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1977), pp. 15-20. See also Johannes Fabian and Ilona Szombati-Fabian, "Folk Art from an Anthropological Perspective," in Perspectives on American Folk Art, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby and Scott T. Swank (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum , 1980), p. 252.

7. Kevin M. Sweeney, "Gravestones," in The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820, edited by Gerald W. R. Ward and William N. Hosley, Jr. (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1985), pp. 485-523; Kevin M. Sweeney, "Where the Bay Meets the River: Gravestones and Stonecutters in the River Towns of Western Massachusetts, 1690-1810," in Markers III: The Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies, edited by David Watters (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1985), pp. 1-46; William N. Hosley Jr., "Architecture," in Ward and Hosley, eds., The Great River, pp. 63-133.

8. David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferral of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981); Robert B. St. George, "Style and Structure in the Joinery of Dedham and Medfield, Massachusetts, 1635-1685," in American Furniture and Its Makers Winterthur Portfolio 13, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 1-46; Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, eds., New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982).

9. See, for example, Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1970); and Lockridge, A New England Town. Even in his study of religious contention entitled Valley of Discord: Church and Society along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725 (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1976), Paul Lucas subscribes to the belief that "most of the early towns [in the Connecticut Valley] were founded by wandering congregations" (p. 40), a generalization contradicted by the settlements begun at Farmington, Lyme, Middletown, Saybrook, Springfield, and Wethersfield.

10. Sherman W. Adams and Henry R. Stiles, The History of Ancient Wethersfield, Connecticut (New York: Grafton Press, 1904), 1:17-79, 135-65, 246-333; and for an insightful treatment, see John P. Demos, Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 340-67. Kevin M. Sweeney, "From Wilderness to Arcadian Vale: Material Life in the Connecticut River Valley, 1635-1760," in Ward and Hosley, eds., The Great River, p. 18.

11. On Steele and Boosey, see Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 2:123-24, 665-66. On the Gilberts, see ibid., 2:353-55; Henry R. Stiles, The History and Genealogies of Ancient Windsor, Connecticut, 2 vols. (Hartford, Conn.: Press of Case, Lockwood & Brainard Company, 1892), 2:288; Patricia E. Kane, "The Joiners of Seventeenth Century Hartford County," Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 35, no. 3 (July 1970): 70. On the Dickinsons, see Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 2:284-91. See also Philip Zea, "The Fruits of Oligarchy: Patronage and the Hadley Chest Tradition in Western Massachusetts," in New England Furniture: Essays in Memory of Benno M. Forman, Old Time New England 72 (Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1987); 1-65.

12. Luke Vincent Lockwood, Colonial Furniture in America, 3d ed., 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1901), 1:251, fig. 221.

13. Nott or Knott was born in Nottingham, England. See George S. Roberts, Historic Towns of the Connecticut River Valley (Schenectady, N.Y.: Robeson & Adee, 1906), p. 157. John Kirk suggested southern Lancashire, Derbyshire, and, to a lesser extent, Lincolnshire as the origin for the motifs. Nottingham is between Derbyshire and Lincolnshire. See John T. Kirk, "Sources of Some American Regional Furniture," Antiques 88, no. 6 (December 1965): 795; and John T. Kirk, Connecticut Furniture, Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967), p. xiii. Most recently Kirk pointed to the Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Westmoreland region. See his American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 98-118, esp. figs. 295, 296. Robert F. Trent has also pointed to the Lancashire-Cheshire region. Robert F. Trent, "New England Joinery and Turning before 1700," in Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 3:501. Nott retired from public life in the mid-1670s when he stopped serving as a selectman. He drew his will two years before his death in 1681, suggesting that he may not have been in good health. See Estate of John Nott, 1681, Hartford Probate District, file no. 3983, Connecticut State Library, hereafter cited as CSL; Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 1:289, 2:521.

14. Anthony Wells-Cole to Kevin M. Sweeney, April 26, 1984. The first sawmill within the boundaries of Wethersfield was operating by 1669. This mill was on the east side of the Connecticut River in what is today Glastonbury. The second, established on the west side of the river in Wethersfield proper, was authorized in 1677 and operating by 1680 at the latest. See Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 1:640-41.

15. Robert F. Trent, "Acquisitions," Notes & News, The Connecticut Historical Society 8, no. 4 (July-August 1983): 2-3. Patricia E. Kane, Furniture of the New Haven Colony: The Seventeenth Century Style (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1973), fig. 5, pp. 18-19; Gerald W. R. Ward, American Case Furniture in the Mabel Brady Garvan and Other Collections at Yale University (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 1988), fig. 20, pp. 83, 84. For joined furniture that is probably related, see Kane, "The Joiners of Seventeenth Century Hartford County," p. 79, fig. 10; Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury, 3 vols. (1928-33; reprinted, New York: MacMillan, 1948-49), 1:fig. 7; Kirk, Connecticut Furniture, p. 7, figs. 9, 26. For the chest at Memorial Hall in Deerfield, see Dean A. Fales Jr., The Furniture of Historic Deerfield (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), p. 165, fig. 351. This chest was owned in the Hoyt family of Deerfield, a family with Windsor, Connecticut, antecedents and no obvious New Haven connections. See George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts (Deerfield: privately printed, 1895-96), 2:213-18. When discussing carving on the chest owned by Yale, Kane wrote, "The enrichment of the convex molding on the stiles and the lower rail of this chest with gouge carving, diagonal lines, and dots also suggest that it may have been made as early as 1640 when the Elizabethan tradition of carving was still strong" (Kane, Furniture of the New Haven Colony, p. 19). These same features are found on the Rocky Hill door.

16. Trent, "New England Joinery and Turning before 1700," pp. 501-4; and Robert F. Trent, "The Emery Attributions," Essex Institute Historical Collections 121, no. 3 (July 1985): 213-15.

17. The attribution of the "sunßower" chests to Blin is based on the linking of a chest that descended in the Bulkeley family to a 1681 entry in the Reverend Gershom Bulkeley's account book. Houghton Bulkeley, "A Discovery on the Connecticut Chest," Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 23, no. 1 (January 1958): 17-19. Susan Schoelwer raises serious questions about several of the assumptions in Bulkeley's attribution of his family's chest to Blin. See Susan Prendergast Schoelwer, "Connecticut Sunßower Furniture: A Familiar Form Reconsidered," [Yale University Art Gallery] Bulletin (spring 1989): 27. Her essay contains the best informed and most thoughtful discussion of the group of "sunßower" chests and cupboards. For the association of Blin with carving from Huguenot or North Country sources, see Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 2:267; Ward and Hosley, eds., The Great River, pp. 187, 198-201; Ward, American Case Furniture, p. 93. Benno M. Forman first suggested that the ßowers were marigolds and a Huguenot emblem based on evidence in Mrs. James M. Lawson, "The Emblematic Flower and Distinguishing Color of the Huguenots," The Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of America 2 (1891-1894): 237-45. Initially, I too believed that Blin was the bearer of a Huguenot or North Country carving tradition, but Schoelwer's article, Jane Blin's research, conversations with Neil Kamil, and my own research on John Nott have prompted me to reassess Blin's probable role in shaping the "sunßower" chests. Stiles claims that he was "of French (prob. Huguenot) origin" (Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 2:104). James Hill claims that Peter Blin was born in London around 1640, even though he could not find confirmation of this fact (James W. Hill, Blin: A Short Genealogy of One Line of the Blin Family, Descended from Peter Blin, the Settler, of Wethersfield, Connecticut [Peoria, Ill.: by the author, 1914], p. 3). Jane Blin's research suggests that Peter Blin may have been born in Leyden in 1639 to Huguenot parents who soon moved to London (Jane Blin, "Notes on Blin, Blynn, Blen, Blinn," [unpublished ms., Connecticut Historical Society, 1979], pp. 1, 3).

18. It has been variously estimated that from thirty to one-hundred chests and six to eight cupboards survive. See Kane, "The Joiners of Seventeenth Century Hartford County," p. 75; Ward, American Case Furniture, pp. 93, 382; Schoelwer, "Connecticut Sunßower Furniture," p. 34. On the motifs, see Kirk, "Sources of Some American Regional Furniture," pp. 790-95. For a discussion of the variation in carving, see Schoelwer "Connecticut Sunßower Furniture," p. 132. My examination of "sunßower" chests has led to similar conclusions. Foote Account Book, pp. 141, 145, 149, Wethersfield Historical Society.

19. Schoelwer, "Connecticut Sunßower Furniture," pp. 28-29. It is, however, unlikely that either man returned to Wethersfield before the November 1678 death of the Reverend Joseph Rowlandson, who died possessed of a cupboard in the "sunßower" style. It is the timing of the return of these woodworkers to Wethersfield, not just their dates of death, as Schoelwer suggests, that precludes the possibility that either man was the originator or sole producer of the chests and cupboards in this style. Dickinson returned to Wethersfield in 1679. Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 2:286. Lucius M. Boltwood in "Genealogies of Hadley Families" gives "about 1681" as the date of Foote's return to Wethersfield (Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley [Springfield, Mass.: H. R. Huntting & Company, 1905], p. 52). Schoelwer also makes this point in "Connecticut Sunßower Furniture," p. 29.

20. Kirk, "Sources of Some American Regional Furniture," pp. 790-95. See discussions in Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 2: 267; Ward, American Case Furniture, pp. 94-95. I am following James Deetz in his use of "archeological tradition" and "horizon in archaeology," though this essay's discussion of seventeenth-century Wethersfield material culture challenges his characterization of seventeenth-century New England material culture as "traditional" or "folk." See Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, pp. 40-41.

21. On tradition and innovation, see Kenneth L. Ames, Beyond Necessity, Art in the Folk Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1977), pp. 66-71, 76-78; Benno M. Forman, "The Chest of Drawers in America, 1635-1730: The Origins of the Joined Chest of Drawers," Winterthur Portfolio 20, no. 1 (spring 1985): 1-2, 14-15; Kevin M. Sweeney, "Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield, Connecticut, 1639-1800," in Material Life in America. 1600-1860, edited by Robert B. St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), pp. 268, 270. Ward indicates that forty-one of the chests have two drawers in American Case Furniture, p. 93. The estimate of the number of households in late-seventeenth-century Wethersfield is based on the 1670 Grain Census for Hartford, Wethersfield, and Windsor in the Wyllis Papers Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society 21 (Hartford, Conn.: Connecticut Historical Society, 1924): 197-99.

22. Sweeney, "Furniture and the Domestic Environment," pp. 266-76. For the development during this period of a similar pattern, see Robert B. St. George, "Fathers, Sons, and Identity: Woodworking Artisans in Southeastern New England, 1620-1700," in The Craftsman in Early America, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1984), pp. 112-13.

23. Evarts B. Greene and Virginia D. Harrington, American Population Before the Federal Census of 1790 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), p. 58. Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 1:541, 545-46, 555-95; Bruce Daniels, The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635-1790 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), pp. 55-56, 140-41, 152-53, 194-95. Kevin M. Sweeney, "Using Tax Lists to Detect Biases in Probate Inventories," in Early American Probate Inventories The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1987, edited by Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1989), p. 38.

24. Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 2:134-35, 495, 500-501; "Connecticut Cabinetmakers Part II," Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 33, no. 1 (January 1968): 2; J. Frederick Kelly, Early Connecticut Meetinghouses, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948), 2:46. Ledger No. 5 Belonging to Elisha Williams & Co. [1738-1756], p. 69, Wethersfield Historical Society.

25. Kevin M. Sweeney, "Furniture and Furniture Making in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Wethersfield, Connecticut," Antiques 125, no. 5 (May 1984), pp. 1157-59. Kevin M. Sweeney, "Chairs and Chair Making in Early Wethersfield," in "Please Be Seated," edited by Beth Ann Spyrison (Wethersfield, Conn.: Webb-Deane-Stevens Museum, 1993), p. 21. Quotation in Abbott L. Cummings, "Connecticut and Its Building Traditions," paper presented at the Association for the Study of Connecticut History Annual Meeting, "Reshaping Traditions: Native Americans and Europeans in Southern New England," November 7, 1992, p. 2.

26. Sweeney, "Chairs and Chair Making in Early Wethersfield," pp. 20-21; Sweeney, "Furniture and Furniture Making in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Wethersfield, Connecticut," pp. 1162-63. See crest rail on fig. 27 and stretchers on fig. 30 in Trent, Hearts & Crowns, pp. 56, 58; for a similar observation see Robert F. Trent and Nancy Lee Nelson, "New London County Joined Chairs 1720-1790" The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 50, no. 4 (fall 1985): 133. For a similar chair, see Trent, Hearts and Crowns, p. 51, fig. 21.

27. Kirk, Connecticut Furniture, pp. 110-11, nos. 192-95; fig. 13 resembles the york chairs pictured in Trent, Hearts & Crowns, pp. 67-68, figs. 41-42; for references to fiddleback chairs in Wethersfield, see Estate of Janna Deming, 1796, Hartford Probate District, file no. 1600, and Capt. Ashbel Riley, 1798, Hartford Probate District, file no. 4489, CSL.

28. Sweeney, "Furniture and Furniture Making in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Wethersfield, Connecticut," pp. 1161-62; Sweeney, "Chairs and Chair Making in Early Wethersfield," pp. 21-22; Patricia E. Kane, 300 Years of American Furniture (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1976), pp. 78-80; Trent and Nelson, "New London County Joined Chairs 1720-1790," pp. 39-51, 55-62, 87, 90-91, 106-8, nos. 1-10, 20-21, 29, 30.

29. Ledger No. 5 Belonging to Elisha Williams & Co. [1738-1756], pp. 42, 119. Adams and Stiles, History of Ancient Wethersfield, 2:114; Estate of Timothy Boardman, 1792, Middletown Probate District, file no. 447, CSL; the high chest resembles the Wethersfield high chest pictured in Sweeney, "Furniture and Furniture Making in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Wethersfield, Connecticut," pp. 1160-61, fig. 9. Sweeney, "Chairs and Chair Making in Early Wethersfield," p. 21.

30. Ledger No. 5 Belonging to Elisha Williams & Co. [1738-1756], pp. 42, 119. Kevin M. Sweeney, "Mansion People: Kinship, Class, and Architecture in Western Massachusetts in the Mid Eighteenth Century," Winterthur Portfolio 19, no. 4 (winter 1984): 239-43. Amelia F. Miller, "Connecticut River Valley Doorways: An Eighteenth-Century Flowering," in The Bay and the River: 1600-1900. The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife: Annual Proceedings 1981, edited by Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1982), pp. 70-72.

31. John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America 1580-1845 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 64-65, 188-90; Susan Allport, Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), p. 37; Bernard L. Herman, The Stolen House (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), pp. 140-41. This is assumed in William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 119-20. In the middle colonies and in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, worm fences replaced earlier post and rail fences. See Esther Louise Larsen, "Pehr Kalm's Observations on the Fences of North America," Agricultural History 21, no. 2 (April 1947): 76-77; Robert D. Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier: Perspectives on the Early Shenandoah Valley (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977), pp. 136-37.

32. Judd, History of Hadley, p. 432. Larsen, "Pehr Kalm's Observations on the Fences of North America," pp. 76-77; Henry Glassie, Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), pp. 225-28.

33. Sweeney, "From Wilderness to Arcadian Vale," pp. 23-25; Kevin M. Sweeney, "Gentlemen Farmers and Inland Merchants: The Williams Family and Commercial Agriculture in Pre-Revolutionary Western Massachusetts," in The Farm: The Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 1986, edited by Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University, 1988), pp. 62-64. In the Shenandoah Valley, the adoption of the worm fence in the last quarter of the eighteenth century was associated with improvements to farmsteads. See Mitchell, Commercialism and Frontier, pp. 136-37. Quotation in Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, p. 38.

34. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978), pp. 245-46. Scott Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1983), p. viii. At times even Howard Odum attacked the "fallacy which identifies regionalism with localism or with areal homogeneities due primarily to isolation, either in space through lack of communication and extra-regional relationships, or in time as in the case of primitive peoples." See Odum, "The American Blend: Regional Diversity and National Unity [1949]," in Jocher, et al., eds., Folk, Region, and Society, p. 197.

35. Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten, pp. 38, 40, 43, 59-60, 89-90. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, p. 257.

36. Florence H. Pettit, America's Indigo Blues: Resist-printed and Dyed Textiles of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Hastings House, 1974), pp. 170, 176, 178, 180.

37. For more along these points, see Swank et al., Arts of the Pennsylvania Germans, pp. vii-x, 3-34, 61-101.

38. Vance, "The Regional Concept as a Tool for Social Research," pp. 119-40. See also Odum, "The American Blend: Regional Diversity and National Unity [1949]," pp. 192-201.