1. This essay could not have been written without the help of Bill Hosley, Brock Jobe, Philip Zea, and Suzanne Flynt who generously offered time, insights, photographs, sources, and encouragement. For a helpful introduction to the vocabulary, see the catalogue entries in Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), pp. xiii–xviii.

2. See the essay by Edward S. Cooke, Jr., in this volume.

3. Robert B. St. George, The Wrought Covenant: Source Material for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England 1620–1700 (Brockton, Mass.: Brockton Art Center, 1797), p. 16.

4. Quoted in Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Deceptive Distinctions: Sex, Gender, and the Social Order (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 9. Epstein’s summary of recent literature is a good beginning point for understanding contemporary scholarship.

5. Anatomical terms from Martin Eli Weil, “A Cabinetmaker’s Price Book,” in American Furniture and Its Makers Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 13, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 80–192; “Thomas Elfe Day Book, 1768–1775,” bound compilation of transcripts published in The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, photocopies at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, N.C.; Brock Jobe, ed., Portsmouth Furniture: Masterworks from the New Hampshire Seacoast: An Introduction (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1992); Brock Jobe, “An Introduction to Portsmouth Furniture of the Mid-Eighteenth Century,” in New England Furniture, Essays in Memory of Benno Forman, edited by Brock Jobe (Boston: Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, 1987), pp. 163–195.

6. Valerie Steele, “Appearance and Identity,” in Men and Women: Dressing the Part , edited by Claudia Brush Kidwell and Valerie Steele (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), p. 6.

7. Claudia Brush Kidwell, “Gender Symbols or Fashionable Details?” in Kidwell and Steele, eds., Men and Women, p. 126.

8. Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 1:figs. 158 (Thomas Hollis, 1766), 163 (Henry Pelham, 1765), 172 (Paul Revere, 1768–1770), 288 (Rev. John Oglivie, 1771), 219 (John Erving, 1772). Copley uses draped tables or pedestals more frequently than polished surfaces, especially in earlier portraits. Ibid., 1:figs. 161 (Mrs. Samuel Waldo, 1764–1765), 162 (Mrs. Theodore Atkinson [with squirrel], 1785), 273 (Mrs. Ezekiel Goldthwait, 1770–1771), 283 (Mrs. Humphrey Devereux [with mitts], 1770–1771), 315 (Mrs. Richard Skinner, 1772), 327 (Mrs. John Winthrop, 1773), 332 (Mr. and Mrs. Issac Winslow, 1774). An exception for women is fig. 331 (Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin, 1773), which shows Mrs. Mifflin with a tape loom. Burke is quoted in Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 72.

9. Prown, Copley, 1:figs. 80, 141, 158, 272. Although Copley places books and papers on many kinds of surfaces, more of his male subjects sit at tables than at desks.

10. On Sarah Prince as correspondent, see Carol Karlsen and Laurie Crumpacker, “Introduction,” The Journal of Esther Edwards Burr (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984).

11. Prown, Copley, 1:figs. 193, 217, 254.

12. Ibid., 1:figs. 183, 255, 319.

13. Owen McNally, “Window to the Past,” Hartford Courant, February 6, 1993, p. B8.

14. Clair Franklin Luther, The Hadley Chest (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Lockwood, and Brainard Company, 1935); Philip Zea, “The Fruits of Oligarchy: Patronage and the Hadley Chest Tradition in Western Massachusetts,” in Jobe, ed., Early New England Furniture, pp. 1–65; Philip Zea and Suzanne L. Flynt, Hadley Chests (Deerfield, Mass.: Memorial Hall Museum, 1992).

15. Suzanne Flynt alerted me to the similarities between certain Hadley chest elements and the pie crust vents I had published as an illustration in Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982). William N. Hosley Jr. and Philip Zea, “Decorated Board Chests of the Connecticut River valley,” Antiques 119, no. 5 (May 1981): 1148–51.

16. Toby Ditz, Property and Kinship: Inheritance in Early Connecticut, 1750–1820 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 65. When daughters received real estate, it was because personalty was lacking, and the value of the land was always significantly less than that inherited by sons. By custom and law, fathers “could simply exclude all daughters and members of daughters’ families from heritable rights in land and confine their share of property to personalty.” In the case of daughters, Ditz argues, bequests of land were substitutes for personal property. She notes, however, that wills undervalue bequests to daughters since most probably received all or part of their portions of moveable goods at marriage (ibid., pp. 69–70). Hannah had a silver cup, three silver spoons, eighteen sheets, and thirteen pillow beers. John Marsh Inventory, Hampshire County Probate Records, 4:138–140.

17. Quoted in Jane Nylander, Our Own Snug Fireside: Images of the New England Home, 1760–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), pp. 59–60. The author thanks Bill Hosely for bringing this gravestone to her attention.

18. Hannah may have become her father’s housekeeper after her mother’s death in 1709, but responsibility for younger children cannot explain her late date at marriage. Her youngest sibling, a girl, was already eighteen. Lucius M. Boltwood, “Family Genealogies,” in History of Hadley, edited by Sylvester Judd (Springfield, Mass.: H.R. Huntting, 1905), pp. 8, 91.

19. John Marsh Will, June 5, 1725, Hampshire County Probate Records, 4:134, Microfilm, LDS Family History Library, Film Number 0879184. As it turned out, little John never did come of age. He died July 3, 1726, age three. Boltwood, “Family Genealogies,” p. 92, 8, 64, 91–92. I can find only three girls in colonial Hadley given a surname for a middle name. Hannah Barnard Hastings may be the only child in eighteenth-century New England named for a cupboard.

20. Jobe, ed., Portsmouth Furniture, pp. 164–65.

21. Ibid., pp. 343, 127; Thaxter (“Tack”) Swan, “Just the Facts: A Slice of Swan History,” typescript, Portsmouth Athenaeum, Portsmouth, N.H.

22. Frances Clary Morse, Furniture of the Olden Time (New York: Macmillan, 1902), p. 26, photocopy in Swan, “Just the Facts.”

23. Swan, “Just the Facts,” chapter 14, p. 2. The catalogue entry in Jobe, ed., Portsmouth Furniture says that the feet were cut off “during the late eighteenth century” (p. 127) but doesn’t explain why then and not later.

24. New England Historical Genealogical Register, 15: 118.

25. James L. Garvin, “That Little World Portsmouth,” in Jobe, ed., Portsmouth Furniture, p. 19. Faith Harrington, “The Emergent Elite in Early 18th Century Portsmouth Society: The Archaeology of the Joseph Sherburne Houselot,” Historical Archaeology 23 (1989): 2–12. My discussion of the Sherburne family and the Sherburne house is also based on unpublished research reports by Richard Candee, Mary Dupry, and Claire Dempsey, undertaken as part of a NEH Planning Grant to Strawbery Banke Museum. Dempsey’s compilations and summaries of primary sources were especially helpful.

26. Jobe, ed., Portsmouth Furniture, pp. 124–27.

27. This reconstruction has no more or less support in surviving documents than any other. I suggest it as a way of expanding the notion of provenance to include broader readings of “inheritance.” There is abundant evidence of the use of objects to reinforce family connections and to tell family stories. There is no reason to assume that objects passed in lock-step from one generation to another or that they moved only at death or marriage. In fact, one of the unexplored themes in the Sherburne chest history is its possible relation to the Mendum as well as the Sherburne family. Eleanor Mendum’s father Nathaniel is listed as a “joiner” in Portsmouth records of the 1720s, though he, like Joseph Sherburne, soon ascended to “shopkeeper” and then to “Esquire.” I wonder if he made or commissioned the Sherburne chest as a gift to his oldest daughter and her husband. If the chest came two years after marriage, the initials of the husband, rather than the wife, are appropriate. Interestingly, Nathaniel Mendum’s estate inventory of 1774 is filled with “curly maple” furniture (Nathaniel Mendum, Craftsmen’s Files, Portsmouth Athenaeum).

28. Cora Ginsburg, “Textiles in the Connecticut Historical Society,” Antiques 107, no. 4 (April 1975): 712–16

29. William Warren, “The Prudence Mourning Picture,” typescript, used by permission, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford. Prudence Punderson Journal, MS79240, Connecticut Historical Society.

30. On October 18, 1783, she married Timothy Rossiter. She gave birth to a daughter, Sophia, on July 18, 1784, and died less than a month later. Marriage Certificate, Punderson Papers, folder 2, Connecticut Historical Society.