1. For the Appleton family, see Robert F. Trent, Historic Furnishings Report—Saugus Iron Works National Historic Site, Saugus, Massachusetts (Harper’s Ferry, W.Va.: National Parks Service, 1982), pp. 6–24.
2. William H. Sumner, “The Eliot Bureau,” New England Historic Genealogical Register 9, no. 4 (October 1855): 329–33. Robert F. Trent and Peter Follansbee, “Repairs Versus Deception in Essex County Cupboards, 1830–1890,” in Rural New England Furniture: People, Place, and Production, edited by Peter Benes (Boston: Boston University and the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, 2000), pp. 13–28. Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Co., 1877), pp. 226–27, no. 72.
3. Irving Whitall Lyon, The Colonial Furniture of New England (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1891), figs. 15, 16. Esther Singleton, The Furniture of Our Forefathers (New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1900–1901), pp. 168–69. Frances Clary Morse, Furniture of the Olden Time (1902; reprint and rev. ed., New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. 87. Trent and Follansbee, “Repairs Versus Deception,” pp. 13–28.
4. Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury, 2 vols. (Framingham, Mass.: Old America Co., 1928), no. 211. Irving P. Lyon, “A Pedigreed Cupboard, Dated 1681 and Initialed IEA for John and Elizabeth Appleton of Ipswich, Massachusetts,” Old Time New England 28, no. 4 (April 1938): 118–22; and Irving P. Lyon, “The Cupboard of Ephraim and Hannah Foster of North Andover, Massachusetts. Dated 1684, Analysis of Its Many Initials,” Old Time New England 28, no. 4 (April 1938): 123–25. Irving P. Lyon, “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Part 1, Florid Type,” Antiques 32, no. 5 (November 1937): 230–37; “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Part 2, Florid Type, Miscellaneous Examples,” Antiques 32, no. 6 (December 1937): 298–301; “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Part 3, Florid Type, Scroll Detail,” Antiques 33, no. 2 (February 1938): 73–75; “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Part 4, The Small-Panel Type,” Antiques 33, no. 4 (April 1938): 198–203; “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Part 5, Small-Panel-Type AYliates,” Antiques 33, no. 6 (June 1938): 322–25; “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Part 6, Other AYliates: A Group Characterized by Geometrical Panels,” Antiques 34, no. 2 (February 1939): 79–81. All of Lyon’s Antiques articles are reprinted in Pilgrim Century Furniture: An Historical Survey, edited by Robert F. Trent (New York: Main Street/Universe Books, 1976), pp. 55–78.
5. Helen Park, “Thomas Dennis, Ipswich Joiner: A Re-examination,” Antiques 78, no. 1 (July 1960): 40–44. Helen Park, “The Seventeenth-Century Furniture of Essex County and Its Makers,” Antiques 78, no. 4 (October 1960): 350–55. Both of Park’s articles are reprinted in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, pp. 84–94. Benno M. Forman, “The Seventeenth-Century Case Furniture of Essex County, Massachusetts and Its Makers” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1968). Benno M. Forman, “Urban Aspects of Massachusetts Furniture in the Late Seventeenth Century,” in Country Cabinetwork and Simple City Furniture, edited by John D. Morse (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Winterthur Museum, 1970), pp. 1–33.
6. Forman, “The Case Furniture of Essex County,” pp. 28–40. The versatility of British woodworkers is demonstrated in Rural Economy in Yorkshire in 1641, being the Account Books of Henry Best, of Elmswell, in the East Riding of the County of York (Durham, Eng.: George Andrews, 1857), pp. 153, 156:
| | 1620, Apr 4. Agreed with Matthewe Carter, for paylinge the swyne stye with sawne ashe payles, to give him for his worke 9d. (per) yeardes, and hee is to sawe them, and to sawe the rayles and postes, and sett them in a groundsell, and rabbit them in to the rayle above; agreed also with him to pale the yearde, and hee is to sawe the rayles and postes, and to have 4d per yearde, for his labor. 1622
Dec 13. Bargained with Matthewe Carter and John Carter his sonne, of Greate Driffeylde, carpenters, to digg upp a walnutt tree of myne, and to sawe it into 2 ynch and a half plankes, and the rest of the small peeces into such peeces as it is fittest for; and to make mee two chayres, one for my selfe, and the other a lesser, well turned and wrought, and I am to give them for doing these things above mentioned, workman like, 10s in money, a bushel of barley, and a pecke of oatmeale, and give them in money 3d for their godspenny. |
7. New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, edited by Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1982) 3: 531–32. Robert F. Trent, “The Emery Attributions,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 121, no. 3 (July 1985): 210–20. Old Town and the Waterside: Two Hundred Years of Tradition and Change in Newbury, Newburyport, and West Newbury, 1635–1835, edited by Peter Benes (Newburyport, Mass.: Historical Society of Old Newbury, 1986), pp. 36, 40–41.
8. For the provenance of the Staniford chest, see Robert W. Skinner, Inc., Fine Americana, Bolton, Massachusetts, October 29, 1982, lot 214A. Additional information on this chest is in Winterthur Museum, object file, 1982.276. For the Reade, Lake, Winthrop, and Symonds inter-marriages, see David Cressy, Coming Over: Migration and Communication Between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 277–86. Rev. Hugh Peter was stepfather to the Reade sisters, having married their mother Elizabeth after Edmund Reade died. See Roger Thompson, Mobility and Migration: East Anglican Founders of New England, 1629–1640 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 152, 166, 196; and Walter Goodwin Davis, “Ancestry of John Lake, Husband of Margaret (Reade) Lake,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register 84, no. 335 (July 1930): 304–17.
9. The Harris and Staniford families lived near Thomas Dennis and witnessed several legal documents for him. These connections may explain why Thomas and Margaret Staniford commissioned Dennis to make them an expensive joined and carved chest the year of their marriage. Irving P. Lyon, “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts,” in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, p. 69. For the London and Boston chests, see Benno M. Forman, “The Chest of Drawers in America, 1635–1670: The Origins of the Joined Chest of Drawers,” Winterthur Portfolio 20, no. 1 (spring 1985): 1–30; and Robert F. Trent, “The Chest of Drawers in America: A Postscript,” Winterthur Portfolio 20, no. 1 (spring 1985): 31–48.
10. Benno M. Forman, “New Findings on the Vocabulary Chest,” Winterthur Newsletter 25, no. 5 (September 1979): n.p.
11. No seventeenth-century scratch-stock is known. Joseph Moxon does not mention scratch-stocks specifically; however, his description of molding planes notes that: “if it be very hard Wood you are to Plane upon...[the angle of the blade to the sole of the plane] is set to 80 Degrees, and sometimes quite upright: So that these hard Woods, are, indeed, more properly said to be Scraped, than Planed” (Joseph Moxon, Mechanick Exercises; or the Doctrine of Handy-works Applied to the Arts of Smithing, Joinery, Carpentry, Turning, Bricklaying [3d ed., 1703; reprint, Mendham, N.J.: Astragal Press, 1994], pp. 73–74). Roubo illustrates examples constructed like a marking or cutting gauge, with an adjustable fence tightened by a wooden wedge (J. A. Roubo, L’Art du Mensuisier, 3 vols. [1769; reprint , Paris: Leonce Laget, 1977], 1: pl. 21, figs. 13–14). The Roubo version of the scratch-stock is discussed in Josef M. Greber, The History of the Woodworking Plane, translated by Seth W. Burchard (Delmar, N. Y.: Early American Industries Association, 1991), pp. 139–40. The authors thank Jay Gaynor for this reference and his insights on scratch-stocks. The 1675 inventory of Lynn, Massachusetts, joiner George Coall (Cole) listed two joynters, a fore plane, three smoothing planes, “2 Plans and revolving plains,” four round planes, three rabbet planes, three hollow planes, and “9 Cresing plains” (W. L. Goodman, “Tools and Techniques of the Early Settlers in the New World,” Chronicle of the Early American Industries Association 29, no. 3 [September 1976]: 40–51). Goodman notes that the creasing planes were most likely “side beads and reeds, and possibly...one or two ogees or ovolo[s].” It is possible that Coall’s “cresing plains” may have been scratch-stocks and that seventeenth-century parlance did not distinguish scratch-stocks from molding planes with conforming soles. Modern scratch-stocks are shop-made, often from small scraps of wood and metal. Some seventeenth-century appraisers may have neglected to list scratch-stocks, whereas others may have referred to them generically (i.e. as “small tools” or “a lot of planes”).
12. Sebastiano Serlio, The Five Books of Architecture (English edition, 1611; reprint, New York: Dover, 1982), bk. 1, ch. 1, fol. 9.
13. Edith Mannon, Mobilier Regional (Paris: Charles Massin, 1998), pp. 21–32; Jacqueline Boccador, Le Mobilier Francais du Moyen Age a la Renaissance (Paris: Monelle Hayot, 1988), passim; Jacques Thirion, Le Mobilier du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance en France (Pairs: Editions Faton, 1998), pp. 90–197.
14. Many New England joiners made drawers with grooved fronts to accept the beveled edges of bottom boards. Because Benno M. Forman and Richard Candee demonstrated thirty years ago that the New England sawmilling industry was up and running by the 1630s, one need not rely on technological determinism to explain the presence in these objects of water-sawn oak, sycamore, and pine. After all, the widespread use of riven oak and water-sawn pine in New England furniture was strictly tied to utility. The rarity of water-sawn hardwoods in early New England furniture, to say nothing of pit-sawn timbers of any species, does not make the Essex County shop tradition idiosyncratic. By the 1670s, supplies of oak timber were dwindling in coastal towns that were founded in the 1630s. The proximity of Ipswich and Newbury to sawmills on the Merrimac and Piscataqua Rivers may have influenced the use of water-sawn oak boards for the tops of cases, although the use of water-sawn sycamore is more difficult to explain.
15. The Sudbury communion table in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum is an exception. It was made from mill-sawn oak joists. For more on this table, see Robert F. Trent, “Joiners and Joinery of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1730,” in Arts of the Anglo-American Community in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), p. 140. A Braintree, Massachusetts, chest in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution and a New Haven chest of drawers with doors in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, also have mill-sawn oak boards. These chests are illustrated and discussed in Peter Follansbee and John Alexander, “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: The Savell Shop Tradition” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996), pp. 81–104, fig. 9; and Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 3: 524–25. For more on seventeenth-century mill sawing, see Benno M. Forman, “Mill Sawing in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts,” Old Time New England 60, no. 220 (April–June 1970): 110–30, and Richard M. Candee, “Merchant and Millwright—The Water Powered Sawmills of the Piscataqua,” Old Time New England 60, no. 220 (April–June, 1970): 131–49. For wood processing, see Forman, “The Seventeenth-Century Case Furniture of Essex County,” pp. 1–13. Robert F. Trent, “What Can a Chair and a Box Do for You?” Maine Antique Digest 15, no. 4 (April 1987); 10c–13c. The methods for converting trees into usable timber differed between England and her colonies. By 1500, shortages of oak in metropolitan areas of England led to the importation of oak from Scandinavia and north Germany. This had political and military ramifications because the Royal Navy appropriated much of the wood, tar, and pitch that arrived in the “wainscot” and “mast” fleets. Wood purchased by the London building and furniture trades was reduced to panels, joists, and other units by pit sawing or frame sawing. Evidence suggests that oak or “wainscot” was imported in the form of great baulks, partly for ease of transport and partly to keep the wood slightly more moist than the ambient atmosphere (Trent, “The Chest of Drawers in America, 1635–1730: A Postscript,” pp. 31–32, nt. 2). This moisture would have made the baulks easier to break up into manageable panels and scantling and possibly minimized warpage during the voyage. The downside of this practice was that moist wood was far heavier than drier stock. Timber obtained from the imported baulks was sawn from many different orientations in the tree, both radial (quarter-sawn) and tangential (plain-sawn). Often saw kerfs are visible on internal surfaces of English furniture. Conversely, almost no English furniture contains wood sawn in wind- or water-powered sawmills such as those frequently built by the Dutch. Apparently, English sawyers actively militated against such mills, and the savings in labor costs versus the expense of maintaining such elaborate machinery probably was not cost-effective in an English context. For more examples of this practice, see Rev. William Harrison, A Description of England (1577, 1587) as quoted in Victor Chinnery, Oak Furniture: The British Tradition (Suffolk, Eng.: Antique Collectors Club, 1979), p. 544: “Of all oke growing in England, the parke oke is the softest, and far more spalt and brittle than the hedge oke. And of all in Essex, that growing in Bardfield parke is the finest for joiner’s craft: for oftentimes have I seene of their workes made of that oke so fine and faire, as most of the wainescot that is brought thither out of Danske, for our wainescot is not made in England.”
16. For two examples of other New England shops that use alignment marks on their joinery, see Robert Blair St. George, “Style and Structure in the Joinery of Dedham and Medfield, Massachusetts, 1635–1685,” in American Furniture and Its Makers, edited by Ian M. G. Quimby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Winterthur Museum, 1979), pp. 1–46; and Follansbee and Alexander, “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree,” p. 92.
17. Irving Whitall Lyon, Colonial Furniture of New England, fig. 16. When Lyon photographed the cupboard in 1886, he recorded but did not publish its family history. This history and the identification of Peter Woodbury as the probable original owner is included in Irving P. Lyon, “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts” in Trent, ed. Pilgrim Century Furniture, pp. 72, 75.
18. Moxon, Mechanick Exercises, pp. 217–19, contains a lengthy description of a sweep:
| | I Had, soon after the Fire of London, occasion to lay Moldings upon the Verges of several round and weighty pieces of Brass: and being [without]...a Lathe of my own, I intended to put them out to be Turned: But then Turners were all full of Employment, which made them so unreasonable in their Prizes, that I was forc’d to contrive this following way to lay Moldings on their Verges. I provided a strong Iron Bar for the Beam of a Sweep....To this Tool is filed a Tooth of Steel with such [moldings]...in the bottom of it, as I have intended to have...upon my work....Then I placed the Center-point of the sweep in a Center-hole made in a square Stud of Mettal, and fixed in the Center of the Plain of the Work, and removed the Socket that rides on the Beam of the Sweep, till the tooth stood just upon its intended place on the Verge of the Work, and there screw’d the Socket fast to the Beam. To work it out, I employ’d a Labourer, directing him in his Left Hand to hold the Head of the Center-pin, and with his Right Hand to draw about the Beam and Tooth, which (according to the strength) he us’d, cut and tore away great Flakes of the Metall, till it receiv’d the whole and perfect Form the Tooth would make; which was as compleat a Molding as any Skillfull Turner could have laid upon it. Having such good Success upon Brass, I improv’d the invention so, as to make it serve for Wood also. And make a Plain-Stock with my intended Molding on the Sole of it, and fitted an Iron to that Stock with the same Molding the Sole had. Through the sides of this Stock I fitted an Iron Beam, to do the Office of the Beam I used for the Sweep, viz to keep the Plain always at what position I lifted from the Center (for thus the Iron in the Plain wrought about the Center, even as the Tooth in the Sweep (before rehearsed) and to that purpose I made a round Hole of about half an Inch Diameter near the end of the Iron: then in the Center of the Work I fixed a round Iron Pin, exactly to fit the said round Hole, putting the round Hole over the pin, and fitting the Iron onto this Stock commodious to work with. I used this Plain with both hands, even as Joyners do other Plains. |
The cutter that Moxon added to the sweep to adapt a metal-scraping tool to wood was clearly a scratch-stock. If he had used a molding plane with a conforming sole curved to match the arc of the intended molding, the tool would not have been adjustable and would have produced only one fixed arc. The sweep blades used by the joiners in the Essex County shop and by many of their contemporaries cut clockwise and counterclockwise. This allowed them to avoid working against the grain in a 180-degree arc. It is possible that the “revolving planes” listed in George Coall’s inventory (see nt. 11) were sweeps. Moxon’s claim that he invented this tool is incorrect.
19. Susan Geib, “Hammersmith: The Saugus Ironworks as an Example of Early Industrialism,” in Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 3: 352–60. The five iron firebacks are illustrated in entry no. 381, written jointly by Geib and Robert F. Trent.
20. For the Boston chest of drawers with doors, see 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), pp. 125–28. For more examples of composite appliqué arches and arcades on seventeenth-century New England furniture, see Patricia E. Kane, Furniture of the New Haven Colony The Seventeenth-Century Style (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1973), nos. 8–11; Robert Blair St. George, The Wrought Covenant: Source Material for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England, 1620–1700 (Brockton, Mass.: Fuller Art Museum, 1979), nos. 17, 18, 54; Robert F. Trent, “New Insights on Early Rhode Island Furniture,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1999), fig. 7, p. 213; Robert F. Trent, “New England Joinery and Turning before 1700,” in Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 3, no. 473; and Trent, “Joiners and Joinery of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1730,” figs. 2, 3, 5.
21. For an illustration of a 1666 English cupboard with rectangular rear stiles and toe-nailed side rails, see Margaret Jourdain, English Decoration and Furniture of the Early Renaissance, 1500–1650 (New York: Scribners Sons, 1924), fig. 301. For the history of the Lawton cupboard, see Robert F. Trent, “The Lawton Cupboard: A Unique Masterpiece of Early Boston Joinery and Turning,” Maine Antique Digest 16, no. 3 (March 1988): 1C–4C.
22. Luke Vincent Lockwood, Colonial Furniture in America, 3d. edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1926), fig. 44. The chest of drawers belonged to Boston collector Dwight M. Prouty when Lockwood published it.
23. The side and rear façades of this chest are similar to those of the Staniford chest (fig. 1) in having two superimposed panels in each end and four in the rear. The Weare cupboard (fig. 75) has one drawer front made of sawn oak.
24. For Waters’ alterations, see Nutting, Furniture Treasury, fig, 458; and Lyon, “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts,” in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, p. 73. For more on Waters, see Richard H. Saunders, “Collecting American Decorative Arts in New England– Part I: 1793–1876” in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, pp. 14–21; Elizabeth Stillinger, The Antiquers (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), pp. 72–73; and Trent and Follansbee, “Repairs versus Deception,” pp. 13–28.
25. Trent, “The Joinery of Middlesex County,” fig. 4. The Cambridge joiners made arch appliqués that differ from those on the Essex County cupboards. The arches on the Cambridge cupboards have rectangular imposts that are architecturally correct rather than tapered ones. Because the Cambridge arcades lack jamb and haunch moldings, they do not have the visual impact of their Essex County equivalents. Trent has suggested that the Cambridge shop may have purchased Boston turned ornament (Catalogue entry for the Cambridge cupboard in David Wood, ed., The Concord Museum: Decorative Arts from a New England Collection [Concord, Mass.: Concord Museum, 1996], pp. 1–2).
26. The authors thank furniture historian Victor Chinnery for pointing out the British cupboard base.
27. Sumner, “The Eliot Bureau,” pp. 329–33; and Lyon, “A Pedigreed Cupboard,” pp. 118–22. John Appleton and Elizabeth Rogers were married in Ipswich on November 23, 1681. See Clarence A. Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700 (Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1977), p. 20. John Appleton’s sister Priscilla married Rev. Joseph Capen of Topsfield, and they owned the chest of drawers illustrated in fig. 53. Lyon’s article describes the most likely connection between the last known owner, Judge Daniel Gookin of North Hampton, New Hampshire, and John and Elizabeth Appleton. For more on the Appletons of Ipswich, see T. Frank Waters, The Old Bay Road from Saltonstall’s Brook and Samuel Appleton’s Farm and A Genealogy of the Ipswich Descendants of Samuel Appleton (Salem, Mass.: Salem Press Co., 1907), pp. 30–31.
28. In “The Eliot Bureau,” pp. 329–30, Sumner reported:
| | [The base] was in a dilapidated state. The top was split and broken, and the outside had been painted with red paint, over which there had been a coat of whitewash. At that time I had an ingenious carpenter, Mr. John Wilson, at work on my mansion house...and after his scraping off the paint and whitewash from the Cabinet, we saw that I had a rich and highly ornamented piece of furniture...with the initials I E A 1681 cut into the wood upon the centre of the door in front. Under my direction, Mr. Wilson attempted to restore it according to the original design, and make it a useful article. Such of the ornaments as remained, were taken off; the broken ones pieced out; and those, which were wanting, were turned and resupplied in the fashion of the old ones. The door was entire, and swung on a round stick or post, about one inch in diameter. This I divided in the centre and hung it on two pair of brass hinges, so that it opens in the middle, instead of on one side of it. The drawer over the door is about four inches in depth, and is almost the only part which remains entire in its original state. There were two shelves inside, which were split and so much defaced, that I removed them, in order to give room for ten shallow pine drawers, which I put in, for papers. I put a thick oak plank under the bottom, and supported it by two oak blocks, for the whole to rest upon. I had a handsome oak board, polished and placed on it, for a top, instead of the old one, which was split and broken. The projecting ornaments in front, on the drawer and door, were very much broken, but not so much so, that the fashion of them could not be discovered. I put locks upon it, and varnished the whole over, so that, like a restored painting, it resembles the original, the initials and date never having been touched. |
For the Boston and New Haven chests of drawers with doors, see Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 3: 522–25. The Boston example is described and illustrated in detail in Ward, American Case Furniture, pp. 125–28. English examples illustrated and discussed in Chinnery, Oak Furniture, pp. 370–71, are similar in form and execution to the Boston example. Chinnery calls these “enclosed chest[s] of drawers.”
29. Lyon, “A Pedigreed Cupboard,” p. 121. In an undated letter to a Mr. Robinson of Harvard University, Lyon wrote: “Now a word of advice. The piece was outrageously reconstructed by...Sumner. It should be now restored to its original state under competent advice. Your own Philip L. Spaulding is eminently qualified to supervise this restoration and would do it with tender regard to proprieties.” Spaulding owned the cupboard illustrated in fig. 27. The authors thank Sandra Grindlay, curator of Harvard University Art Museums, for making Lyon’s letter available.
30. Nutting, Furniture Treasury, fig. 1011. Lyon recorded that the table was found in the Furness home in Manchester, New Hampshire, in 1921. See Lyon, “Oak Furniture of Ipswich Massachusetts,” in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, p. 75. Little is known about the table before the late nineteenth century. The Appleton provenance associated with the piece is not entirely clear. In the 1920s, the table was purchased from a Mrs. Lily May (Appleton) Furness of Manchester. She was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, in 1858, the daughter of George Appleton, Jr., and Esther Knowlton Annable of Ipswich. Tracing the table back in the direct patrilineal line of the Appleton family does not lead back to the original owners of the Appleton cupboard, but to a cousin. The 1920 Federal Census for Manchester lists James C. Furness and Lillie M. Furness. Her place of birth is listed as Massachusetts. Her death record identifies her as Lilly May Appleton who was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, on January 17, 1858, the daughter of George Appleton, Jr. and Esther Knowlton Annable. Index to Massachusetts Birth Records, 1856–1860, vol. 114, p. 205.
31. The cupboard belonged to collector Philip L. Spaulding. The caption in Wallace Nutting’s Furniture Treasury (1928) states that the cupboard is dated 1689 when it is actually dated 1683. An ash splint loop is attached to the backboard of the upper storage compartment with wrought nails. The date and purpose of this feature is unclear.
32. See caption for fig. 27: Ian C. Bristow, Interior House-Painting Colors and Technology, 1615–1840 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 170–71.
33. The base appears in an 1896 photo of Little’s house. See fig. 7 in Saunders, “Collecting American Decorative Arts in New England–Part I: 1793–1876,” in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, p. 21. See Cook, The House Beautiful, pp. 226–27, fig. 72. The rear boards, which are most likely replacements, fit in a groove in the top rail, and are toe-nailed to the rear stiles. There is no groove in the inner edge of these stiles. The rear framing of the Perkins cupboard lacks these grooves as well.
34. Two related chests with one drawer have comparable red and black striped paint schemes. See Benes, ed., Old Town and the Waterside, p. 36; and Chinnery, Oak Furniture, p. 225, pl. 9.
35. Irving P. Lyon, “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts,” in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, pp. 67, 70. Francis Shaw (1855–1935) of Wayland, Massachusetts, owned the cupboard by the 1890s, and it eventually belonged to Mrs. B. A. Behrend, who corresponded with Lyon regarding the piece’s history and restoration. When it was sold in 1999, it appeared in the same condition as shown in the photographs from Lyon’s articles in the 1930s. It has since been restored, in an attempt to correct some of the earlier restoration work. For a discussion of the Perkins cupboard, see Sotheby’s Fine Americana and Silver, New York, June 17, 1999, lot 187.
36. The authors thank Philip Ruhl for his experimentation with and insights on this half-column turning technique.
37. Lyon, “The Cupboard of Ephraim and Hannah Foster,” pp. 123–25. According to Lyon’s research, Hannah was born in 1661 and would have been sixteen when she married Ephriam. James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, 4 vols. (1860–1862; reprint, Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1965), 2: 90, 187, also gives 1661 as her birth date.
38. Richard H. Randall, Jr., American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1965), fig. 22.
39. Charles Hummel, With Hammer in Hand (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia for the Winterthur Museum, 1968), fig. 11 illustrates rotary button bits.
40. Descendants of the Bradstreet, Wildes, and Waite or Waitt families of Topsfield, Massachusetts, donated the chest to the Brick Store Museum in Kennebunk, Maine, in 1999. The chest probably passed from Joseph and Priscilla to their daughter Elizabeth Bradstreet (1691– 1781); to her daughter Mary Wildes (1731–1810); to her son Sylvanus Wildes (1754–1829); to his daughter Elizabeth (1787–1853), who married William Waitt (1785–1817). The donors’ grandmother stated that the previous owner of the chest was “Mrs Elizabeth Waite.” This genealogy was compiled from Vital Records of Topsfield, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849, 2 vols. (Topsfield, Mass: Topsfield Historical Society, 1903), 2: 208, 245; Douglas Wright Cruger, A Wildes Genealogy: the Family of John Wild of Topsfield Massachusetts and His Descendants in Old Arundel, Maine (Portland, Me.: privately printed, 1990), p. 7; Walter Goodwin Davis, The Ancestry of Dudley Wildes 1759–1820 of Topsfield Massachusetts (Portland, Me.: Anthoensen Press, 1959), pp. 1–36; and The Capen Family: Descendants of Bernard Capen of Dorchester, Massachusetts, compiled by Rev. Charles Albert Hayden (Minneapolis, Minn.: privately printed, 1929), pp. 20, 21, 36. For more on the Capens and their house, see Samuel Chamberlain and Narcissa G. Chamberlain, The Chamberlain Selection of New England Rooms 1639–1863 (New York: Hastings House, 1972), pp. 46–47; Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Massachusetts and Its First Period Houses: A Statistical Survey” in Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts, edited by Abbott Lowell Cummings (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 1979), p. 187.
41. The tip of a turned pendant two inches long (like that of the leaf table shown in fig. 22) would be exactly level with the bellies of the side brackets.
42. A chest marked “HT 1685” is contemporary with the Capen chest of drawers. The former, known as the “Brown” chest, has a history in the Chebacco section of Ipswich (now Essex). Its turned ornament suggests that the shop may have begun using medium-height large half-columns for chests with one drawer. Lyon, “The Oak Furniture of Ipswich, Massachusetts,” in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, pp. 69, 71; and Helen Park, “The Seventeenth-Century Furniture of Essex County and Its Makers” also in Trent, ed., Pilgrim Century Furniture, pp. 91, 352, fig. 5.
43. Torrey, New England Marriages Prior to 1700, p. 572. These connections suggest that Timothy Perkins and Joseph Capen’s father-in-law commissioned their chests from the same shop. Given the strong local tradition that the latter’s daughter Priscilla abhorred the domestic arrangements provided by the church, it is possible that Timothy Perkins felt compelled to purchase a chest of drawers by the same maker as an oblique comment on the new minister’s wife. Samuel Symonds’ father John was the most important joiner in Salem. In 1682, Samuel made a ten-foot-long joined oak pulpit for the Topsfield meeting house, where he was a member of the congregation. For more on the Symonds family, see Forman, “The Seventeenth-Century Case Furniture of Essex County,” pp. 44–46.
44. Roland B. Hammond, The Collection of Samuel Dale Stevens (1859–1922) (North Andover, Mass.: North Andover Historical Society, 1971), p. 1.
45. In a slight variation on the Capen model, the maker or makers framed the rear of the “TEP” chest with two horizontal panels over four vertical ones, and the example illustrated in fig. 62 with two horizontal panels over three vertical ones.
46. Dr. Micajah Sawyer and Sibyll Farnham were married in Newburyport on November 27, 1766. Hannah Sawyer was the second wife of Lt. George Lee, who was possibly born in Salem. See Nutting, Furniture Treasury, fig. 444. John B. Paine to Irving P. Lyon, November 24, 1936, Irving P. Lyon Papers, Collection 62, Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Museum. Thomas Amory Lee, “Old Boston Families No. 6, The Lee Family,” The New England Historic Genealogical Register 76, no. 301 (July 1922): 197–223. Massachusetts Death Records 1861–1865, (microfilm) vol. 185, p. 164. Vital Records of Newburyport, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1911), 1: 344, 2: 424.
47. Boston or London case pieces with dovetailed drawers may have been a source for some of the drawer construction techniques used by the Essex County joiners during the 1680s and 1690s. All of the drawers except the third from the top have nails and one dovetail securing the sides to the front. The second and fourth drawers have rabbeted backs that are nailed to the sides. The back of the top drawer has one rabbeted and nailed rear corner and the other joined with a single dovetail. The third drawer, which is the deepest, has two dovetails and nails securing each corner. For information about London-trained joiners in seventeenth-century Boston and the arrival of Brocas, see Forman, “The Chest of Drawers in America,” p. 21.
48. The top board of the base section is water-sawn oak. The 1661 inventory of Thomas Sallows of Salem lists “1 Court Cubbard 12s” and “1 Cushion for a Cubbard’s head 1s” (Probate Records of Essex County, Massachusetts, 1635–1681, edited by George Francis Dow, 3 vols. [Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1916–1920], 1: 418–19).
49. On the upper section, the joiner used three mitered inserts with bosses to divide the channel molding of the frieze. This design complements the vertical orientation of the stiles and half-columns of the storage compartment and resonates with the three bisected drawers of the lower case.
50. The maker of the Sawyer cupboard cut the channel moldings and edges of the arches and jambs with the same scratch-stock irons used on other examples in the group. The large astragal moldings, which appear to have been cut with a hollow plane and a fenced rabbet plane, are identical to those on the other cupboards that follow. On the first and third drawers of the Sawyer cupboard, the joiner made the inner edges of the chamfered moldings and plaques the same thickness. This enabled him to use the same scratch-stock moldings adjacent to either component. The joiner attached the backplates with brass upholstery nails. The pierced brass keyhole escutcheon on the door appears to be original, but the lock is replaced.
51. The back of the upper case is constructed like that of the Foster cupboard (fig. 40), but has a single water-sawn white pine board installed horizontally in the top of the frame. The joiner beveled the top edge and ends to fit into grooves in the rear stiles and upper rear rail, slid the panel in from below, and nailed it to the rear face of the lower rear rail. This rail, which supports the floorboards of the storage compartment, is positioned forward of the grooves for the back panel. The frame of the lower case has two white pine panels divided by a central muntin with edge moldings. The stiles and rails of the frame are chamfered. Although this is atypical of this shop, similar chamfering occurs on joined furniture from Plymouth Colony. See St. George, Wrought Covenant, p. 26, fig. 20A; and Peter Follansbee, “Unpacking the Little Chest,” Old Time New England 78, no. 268 (Spring/Summer 2000): 5–23. The sides of the Sawyer cupboard’s base have applied moldings around the panels, rather than scratch-stock edge moldings and chamfers on the frame like many other pieces in the group. Unlike all the other cupboards from this shop, the side panels of the upper case are horizontal. The drawer bottoms and floorboards of the storage compartment are riven oak and have V-joints. All of the other examples have either butt joints or tongue-and-groove joints. The Perkins cupboard is built as one case; however, it was completely disassembled, so its pillar orientation is not conclusive.
52. The Sawyer cupboard also has a variety of bosses. Large, turned oval bosses are on the stiles of the frieze and lower side panels of the base, and smaller turned ones are on the arcade panels and beneath the knobs of the carved drawer. Small round bosses made with a rotary cutter are on the upper stiles, arcade panels, and drawer plaques. All of the latter bosses are similar in diameter and cross-section except the ones on the top drawer, which have small central protrusions. The small half-columns on the upper rear stiles of the Sawyer cupboard are similar to the large half-columns on the Perkins cupboard, but the former have more collars.
53. Sybil Noyes, Charles Thornton Libby, and Walter Goodwin Davis, Genealogical Dictionary of Maine and New Hampshire (1928–1939; reprint, Baltimore, Md.: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1972), p. 364.
54. Small oval bosses are on the mitered inserts of the frieze rail, and larger ones are on the side corners of the upper stiles, side rails of the top drawer, and side panels of the lower case. Irregularities in the ornament on the sides of the front stiles likely stem from the restoration.
55. The interior struts are joined to the front and rear rails of the base. Three oak boards form a shelf at the front and sides of the recessed compartment. The soffit boards on the unit above the compartment have beveled edges that fit into grooves in the front and side rails. This feature occurs on all of the Essex County cupboards with jetties.
56. For a description of dragon beams, see Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625–1725 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 55, 56. On the Weare cupboard, the soffit boards on the lower section engage the rails overhanging the sides and front. The boards at the sides extend front-to-back and those at the front extend side-to-side. The side boards provide the greatest stability because they fit into grooves in both the side and front rails. Framing members and pillars support some jetties (i. e., the jetty on the lower section of the cupboard illustrated in fig. 34) on furniture in the Essex County group. In fact, the cupboard shown in figure 34 never had a soffit in its framed overhang at the front.
57. Cummings, Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, pp. 13–15, 112, 113, 207. Cummings illustrates two pendants from house frames in Newbury (figs. 188, 189) and others from Topsfield and Hamilton (figs. 165 and 166.) The discussion and sketch of the Ross Tavern framing is on pp. 74–77. Evidence suggests that jettied house frames were not common in New England before 1650. For a 1657 building contract that includes a jettied second story, see Abbott Lowell Cummings, “Massachusetts Bay Building Documents, 1638–1726” in Cummings, ed., Architecture in Colonial Massachusetts, p. 193.
58. Nutting, Furniture Treasury, figs. 444–47.
59. The cupboard descended in the family of Mrs. Charles Sprague Sargent, whose husband founded the Arnold Arboretum.
60. Randle Holme, Academie or Store house of Armory & Blazon (1688; reprint, Menston, Eng.: Scholar Press, 1972), bk. 3, ch. 3, p. 100 refers to diamond-shaped decoration: “Arris Ways, is anything set or hung Diamond wise, having one corner of the square set upwards, the other downwards.”
61. See caption for fig. 91: Only eight or nine New England square tables from the seventeenth century are known. Associated with either dining or reading and writing, they usually have riven oak bases and multi-board, oak tops. Some have maple frames. Despite their name, these tables were generally out of square by two or three inches. This example, however, is an exception. The top is 46" x 45 3/8", and the base is 38 1/8" x 37 7/8". These dimensions are close enough to be regarded as square by New England joinery standards. Lyon Papers, box 7. For the history of the table attributed to Jacques, see Benes, Old-Town and the Waterside, p. 72. Higgins’ sister married John L. Abbott.
62. Several one-drawer chests and an elaborate dressing box attributed to the Essex County shop have dates ranging from 1693 to 1701.
63. Forman, “The Chest of Drawers in America,” pp. 9–15; and Fairbanks and Trent, eds., New England Begins, 3: 501, 522–24, 539–40. Although furniture historian Benno M. Forman believed that the shift from the carved phase of mannerism to the applied ornamental style began during the 1660s in New England, recent research by Robert Trent suggests that it occurred much earlier. For Plymouth joinery, see St. George, Wrought Covenant, and Follansbee, “Unpacking the Little Chest.” For Cambridge joinery, see Trent, “Joiners and Joinery of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, 1630–1730,” pp. 123–148, and David Wood, ed., Concord Museum, pp. 1–2. For Woburn joinery, see David Wood, ed., Concord Museum, pp. 3–5. For Salem joinery, see Forman, “Seventeenth-Century Case Furniture of Essex County,” pp. 41–55.
64. Parisian styles reached England through trade with the continent and the immigration of French Protestant artisans. The Huguenot diaspora began during the sixteenth century and increased after Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes in 1685.
65. For West Country and North Country cupboards with cantilevered rails in the upper case, see Chinnery, Oak Furniture, pp. 486, 491–94.
66. In addition to houses and public buildings, furniture joiners occasionally worked on gristmills, fulling mills, sawmills, warehouses, wharves, and bridges. This was especially true of tradesmen residing near rivers or in the coastal regions of New England. Some furniture joiners also ventured into shipbuilding, block making, bridge building, coopering, pump making, dish turning, wagon making, and the production of ox yokes, whereas others did less specialized work such as fencing and making pipestave blanks for export to the West Indies and the wine islands.
67. For lists and genealogies of Ipswich woodworkers, see Forman, “Seventeenth-Century Case Furniture of Essex County”; Robert E. P. Hendrick, “John Gaines II and Thomas Gaines I, Turners of Ipswich, Massachusetts” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1964); Susan Mackiewicz, “Woodworking Traditions in Newbury, Massachusetts, 1635–1745” (master’s thesis, University of Delaware, 1981); Robert Tarule, “The Joined Furniture of William Searle and Thomas Dennis: A Shop Based Inquiry into the Woodworking Technology of the Seventeenth-Century Joiner” (Ph. D. diss., Graduate School of the Union Institute, 1992); and Susan Spindler Nelson, “The Life and Times of Capt. Abraham Knowlton, Joiner of Ipswich, Massachusetts, 1699–1751” (master’s thesis, Boston University, 1998). Three tables, two joined cradles, and a joint stool, some of which have strong histories of ownership in Newbury, are attributed to the Jaques shop tradition. Mackiewicz, “Woodworking Traditions in Newbury, Massachusetts,” pp. 1–39. The quote pertaining to the meeting house is on p. 30. The First Parish, Newbury, Massachusetts 1635–1935, edited by Eliza Adams Little and Lucretia Little Isley (Newburyport, Mass.: privately printed, 1935), p. 31. Jaques Family Genealogy, edited by Roger Jaques and Patricia Jaques (Decorah, Iowa: Anundsen Publishing Co., 1995), pp. 26, 33, 67.
68. Abraham Hammett, The Hammett Papers: Early Inhabitants of Ipswich, Massachusetts 1633–1700 (Ipswich, Mass.: privately printed, 1880–1899), p. 246. George A. Perkins, The Family of John Perkins of Ipswich (Salem, Mass.: privately printed, 1889), p. 23. |