Among Old Sturbridge Village’s extensive furniture collections are many pieces too delicate for permanent viewing, so a new exhibition offers a rare opportunity to see gems from the collection that are rarely brought out of storage and several never previously shown publicly.
Both well-known and newly appreciated furniture makers of rural Massachusetts are given their long overdue recognition in the exhibition, “Convenient and Fashionable: Furniture of Inland Massachusetts, 1790‱830,” including Nathan Lombard of Sutton, Solomon Sibley from Ward (now Auburn), Alden Spooner and George Fitts of Athol, William Lloyd of Springfield and John Smith of Barre.
On view since October and running through next fall, the scholarly exhibition surveys furniture from the peak of the Federal period with local origins. The exhibition comprises 22 pieces of furniture, along with a handful of related objects, such as portraits, paintings, a trade sign and an account book.
“This represents a select group of pieces that are documented and have been made in and or used in central Massachusetts,” said guest curator Nan Wolverton, who was a decorative arts curator at Old Sturbridge Village from 1996 to 2003, overseeing the furniture, glass and decorative arts collections.
Wolverton relished the opportunity for this “homecoming” and spending time with the collections as she put together an exhibit that highlights more than a dozen pieces often kept out of the public eye, owing to their fine condition. The exhibition came about when the collections committee set a goal of sharing more of its collections with the public, albeit on a temporary basis.
The exhibition highlights not only the furniture makers who worked in the region during this period and the different types of furniture that were available here, but also how the makers’ styles evolved over the course of their careers as public tastes changed.
Several works by the team of Alden Spooner and George Fitts are featured, including a square back Windsor side chair, circa 1808‱813, with double bows and a bent back; a sofa by Spooner, circa 1815′0, with mahogany, birch and maple inlays, including well-executed icicle inlays on the front legs, and a cherry and mahogany stand with string inlay, circa 1808‱813, that is a good representation of the makers’ sophistication in cabinetry.
A centerpiece of the exhibit is the 1807 bowfront chest of drawers made by Spooner that is used as the cover image for the exhibition in promotional materials and inspired modern cabinetmaker Norm Abrams, host of PBS’s The New Yankee Workshop and a village trustee, to create a reproduction of this piece for his show. He has said he found the task quite challenging, in trying to do dovetails on a bowfront, as well as not having access to old-growth trees locally, he had to forego the original’s single-board top in favor of using several pieces of wood for the top.
Given the small size of the Visitors Center where the exhibit has been staged, some tough choices had to be made when considering which works could be included. A lovely but large sideboard made right here in Sturbridge had to be left out due to its size, while a grouping of painted chairs, mostly marked by their makers, also was excluded, as they dated to a later period than that on which the exhibition focuses.
Pieces chosen were selected for not just their craftsmanship, but also their provenance. Many of the pieces are marked by their makers and have documented histories of ownership, dating back to the original buyers who acquired them as well, as those who inherited them.
One piece in the exhibition never displayed before is a reverse serpentine chest that John Smith made in 1793. The chest has always descended to a female member of the family and was acquired for the village’s collection by a Smith family descendant, who still had the paper documenting the maker and the piece’s provenance stored safely in the chest’s top drawer.
As an aside, Wolverton noted that since the exhibition opened, she has become aware of a number of pieces that are now believed to be from this region. “There are many pieces made in inland Massachusetts and over the years have been misattributed to Rhode Island or Connecticut.”
The exhibition not only has opened up research into attributions, but also the quality of furniture making that was going on in rural Massachusetts at the time. As inland communities became more wealthy, people wanted more sophisticated and elegant furniture for their homes and found that they did not have to look to Boston or elsewhere to find it.
Many of the area’s early furniture makers were farmers who had solid woodworking skills and found side work making furniture in addition to their day jobs. Much of the furniture was made in winter as the makers were kept busy with farming and outside carpentry the remainder of the year.
An example of this is represented in the exhibition in a circa 1790‱810 chest-on-chest by Solomon Sibley, maple with chestnut and pine as secondary woods and retaining original brasses. The chest has an elaborate bracket base, but the upper and lower cases are fairly simple. “Sibley had the potential to produce high-quality furniture but without year-round repetition of cabinetry work, it was less easy to refine skills,” says Wolverton.
The Sturbridge collection also includes a set of Windsor chairs and a 7-foot table by Sibley. Sibley’s account book from 1799 to 1839, showing his income from making furniture and farm equipment, as well as doing farm work, is of interest and is available in the village’s research library.
While most inland furniture makers got their start as general woodworkers making furniture to order in their farming communities, many talented woodworkers eventually specialized in cabinetmaking or chairmaking as their following grew. Life in the early Nineteenth Century was tough, and the unsteady economy bred a generation of entrepreneurs, but some craftsmen, such as Zacheus Gates of Harvard, left to seek their fortunes elsewhere, while other craftsmen adapted their styles to the changing taste of their customers.
It was also not uncommon for some makers to transform their studio-workshops into showroom-warehouses filled with ready-made furniture to fill the need for affordable furniture and serve a wholesale market by sending their wares elsewhere as canals, railroads and roads offered shipping opportunities to urban areas.
A shelf clock by Gates, circa 1810, with cherry, mahogany and maple inlays, and inscribed Zacheus Gates on the painted dial, shows his skill, but the Harvard clockmaker relocated in 1812 to Charlestown, Mass., to make clocks for a larger customer base. A tall case clock by Gates is also in the village’s collection, in the adjacent clock gallery.
One of two desks in “Convenient and Fashionable” is a circa 1812 desk by Ezekiel Brigham Jr (1789‱848) of Grafton that takes a popular Eighteenth Century form and updates it with Federal details, such as string inlay, flared French bracket feet and oval stamped brasses.
Brigham had affixed a paper label to the underside of one of the desk’s drawers that boasts he “offers for sale all kinds of Cabinet Work of a middling good Workman with also Chairs of all kinds Cheap for Cash.” In order to stay competitive, Brigham was likely working as a retailer and a maker, marketing his work as “middling good” †acceptable and reasonably priced.
Jonathan Fairbank Jr of Harvard shows exceptional skill as a cabinetmaker with a circa 1816′0 mahogany card table on view. The distinctive shape and well-turned legs speak to his skills, and the complex shape is often seen with card tables made in rural Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Newburyport. By 1833, Fairbanks was operating a small factory and along with a partner, Sylvester Priest, he had 13 men working for him, making looking glass frames and candle boxes, items that were easily shipped en masse.
Besides the Windsor side chair by Spooner and Fitts, the exhibit includes a Nineteenth Century Windsor rocking chair by Warren Bowen of Brookfield. Bowen was documented as a chair maker, probably selling locally and in far-flung markets, and helped spur the local cabinetry industry by constructing a grist mill, fulling mill, dye works, carding mill and clothier’s shop along the banks of the Quinebaug River in Sturbridge.
The exhibition has been well received, with Wolverton commenting that traffic has been noticeably heavier in the center owing to the show’s widespread appeal. “The village is planning to continue to mount exhibitions that feature objects from the collections that have not been on view in years,” Wolverton added.
The museum is at 1 Old Sturbridge Village Road. For information, www.osv.org or 508-347-3362.
