A short history of the Tennessee sugar chest

Magazine Antiques, Sept, 2003 by Robert Hicks, Benjamin Hubbard Caldwell, Jr.

The Tennessee sugar chest was first introduced to readers of The Magazine ANTIQUES nearly seventy years ago in the first serious article on the subject ever to appear outside the South. (1) So it seems appropriate that new discoveries of this peculiarly southern furniture form should be discussed in the pages of this magazine.

Within the small group of antebellum furniture forms most common in the South, the sugar chest in its many variations remains the most coveted by Tenessee collectors. Indeed the possessions of the family sugar chest has been known to divide heirs into enemy camps. Long after the price of sugar had fallen, the sugar chest remained a revered object. To understand the strange aura that surrounds the sugar chest it is necessary to understand a bit of its history and lore.

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Sugar has been prized throughout the ages, and as with most valued commodities, its storage has been tied to the lock and key. That said, no one took sugar more to heart than did the early settlers in the backcountry of the American South. It was one commodity that few seemed willing to live without. The earliest records of life in Tennessee repeatedly mention the importation of cane sugar in loaf form from New Orleans as well as local attempts to manufacture brown or maple sugar and sugar substitutes like sorghum.

Christopher Ervin McEwen (1790-1868) wrote of his early childhood in the backcountry of Tennessee:

   As to living, it was of a very common kind.
   Teacake and pound cake were not known
   amongst us. After flour could be procured
   and peach trees grown, we had what we called
   Dutch oven pie, well seasoned with homemade
   sugar, and occasionally, chicken pie. We made
   an abundance of tree sugar. Some families
   would make five or six hundred pounds,
   and some that were better off for kettles,
   1,000 pounds. (2)

From the late eighteenth century through most of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, shipments of goods upriver from New Orleans were few and infrequent. Before the advent of the steamboat in 1818, it could take as long as a year for a flatboat to travel from New Orleans to Nashville. (3) Shipments of sugar, most often molded into hard cone shapes, arrived in Nashville approximately every twelve months. Thus it is little wonder that the sugar chest was ubiquitous in inventories throughout much of the southern backcountry.

Those early chests are often little more than locked boxes, sometimes with a ledger drawer, for it was said that the good wife knew to the teaspoon how much sugar was on hand at any given time. And well she should have, since before the advent of the steamboat there was still land in the backcountry that sold for less per acre than a pound of sugar. (4)

With the coming of the steamboat, travel and delivery time were greatly reduced. (5) During the third decade of the nineteenth century regular shipments of sugar arrived via steamboat from New Orleans in less than a month, and the price of sugar plunged. Although merchants in both river towns and landlocked villages now kept sugar constantly on hand, in rural areas the tradition of buying it in bulk continued through the Civil War. Even then it was still expensive enough to warrant keeping under lock and key.

Although it seems logical that the sugar chest would gradually disappear in the backcountry, from the second quarter of the nineteenth century to well past mid-century, cabinetmakers were transforming the lowly sugar box into sugar chests, sugar cases, sugar tables, sugar stands, sideboard sugar chests, sugar desks, and--while not found to date in any inventory of the time--a combination sugar chest and cellaret (or case and bottles, as cellarets are known locally) (see Pls. II, III). (6)

It has long been held that the sugar chest was almost the exclusive property of the southern upper and upper-middle classes. Yet a survey this year of ninety-one sugar chests that can be identified as having been made in Williamson County, Tennessee, found the overwhelming majority to have come from yeoman-class farms, despite the county's large antebellum population of prosperous planters. (7)

The sugar chest is not a tangible survivor of the courtly Old South of grand plantations but rather of the southern backcountry, born of the scarcities that came hand in hand with the area's early isolation. The absence of the sugar chest from the inventories of the wealthiest families after sugar became readily available throughout Tennessee may be closely related to their sense of fashion. For these families, storing sugar may have seemed provincial and old-fashioned. But among their yeoman neighbors the tradition died hard. We have found more than one sugar chest made in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, long after there could be any clear need to store massive amounts of sugar. Odder still is the near mythic aura that the form began to acquire just as the last of the sugar was removed from the old chest. Because of its small size, the sugar chest was ill suited to store anything else except possibly liquor. Unfortunately, the temperance movement was in full swing just as these cabinets became available for other uses.