A group of Concord, Massachusetts, furniture

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by David F. Wood

On the basis of their construction, the six high chests of drawers and the slab table base illustrated here can be attributed to a single, most unusual, shop. All the pieces that have histories of ownership are from Concord, Massachusetts, which is nineteen miles, or half a day's horseback ride, from Boston. Founded in 1635, Concord had a population of about twelve hundred in the eighteenth century, most of whom lived on some one hundred farms around the town. One of the two towns in Middlesex County where circuit courts were convened, Concord was on the main road leading west to the newer communities of southern New Hampshire, many of them populated by former residents of Concord.(1)

Some of the furniture under consideration has been published sporadically over the past eighty years, but Myrna Kaye was the first to distinguish the unusual design and construction details of the group and compare them to Boston furniture.(2) A twentieth-century tradition attributed the case furniture to the Concord cabinetmaker Joseph Hosmer (1735-1821),(3) but a comparison of these pieces to a chest on chest that can be firmly attributed to Hosmer(4) rules him out, for he worked in a manner consistent with Boston practices.

Most of the pieces in the group are analogous to Boston and Salem furniture in over-all design. Three of the chests (Pls. I, IV, X) have flat pilasters flanking the facade on the upper case - a feature that first appeared on Boston furniture of the 1730s and persisted in Boston and Essex County, Massachusetts, until the end of the century.(5) However, they differ in some details. The chest in Plate X has a flat top, which is unusual in combination with flanking pilasters,(6) and the chest in Plate II has blocking in the upper case, which is also rare.(7) The stiff cabriole legs, unusual bases to the flanking columns in the upper cases, inverted triangular drops below the central finials, and chamfered rather than molded drawer fronts are all distinctive features.

In the absence of a recorded history, the design features alone would suggest that the group was made outside - perhaps well outside Boston. However, the really distinguishing feature of the group is the construction. No other eighteenth-century New England case pieces are at once so ambitious in design and so crude in execution. Their construction suggests that they were made in a community somewhere in the neighborhood of the moon.

The objects under discussion all appear to date from the 1770s. The high chest shown in Plate II was owned by William Emerson and may be the one cited as "Case Draws Swell'd work" in his inventory.(8) The chest on chest shown in Plate I was owned by Hugh Cargill, who moved to Concord in 1774, and is probably the "case of draws" valued at twenty-five dollars in his inventory.(9) According to Stow family history the high chest in Plate IV descended from Ebenezer Stow, who married Mary Hartwell on December 28, 1775.

By 1770 cabinetmaking in Boston was half a century old. The problems involved in framing a case or making a drawer had been worked out in English and Continental furniture shops. Their solutions were adopted and adapted in Boston shops, where the level of production demanded efficiency. But whereas Boston furniture is nearly made and relatively consistent,(10) the group under discussion is not. The dovetails are large, ill-fitting, and irregular (see Pl. Xa). The saw cuts regularly overshoot the scribed mark, often by a quarter of an inch or more, and the cuts are coarse, indicating either a thick blade or an unusual set to the teeth on the saw. Dovetailed joints are reinforced with a single nail driven through the top dovetail.

Boston-made drawers of the 1730s often have the bottom nailed to the edges of the sides and back and nailed into a rabbet cut in the drawer front, so that the drawers ride on their bottoms. By mid-century the common Boston practice was either to slide the bottom into grooves cut into the sides, so that the drawers ran on the lower edges of their sides; or to fit the bottom flush with the sides in rabbets cut in the sides and then nail a strip over each joint on which the drawer ran. By contrast, the maker of the group under consideration simply held the bottom between the drawer sides with small nails and nailed it into the rabbeted front and to the bottom edge of the back, so that the drawer ran on its bottom and the edges of its sides.(11)

The heights of the drawer sides of the Concord group are consistently between five eighths of an inch and one inch less than the case opening, while in Boston work this difference is usually one quarter of an inch or less. In addition, the width of each drawer at the back is three eighths to five eighths of an inch less than the width at the front. In Boston work the difference is about one sixteenth of an inch. The drawers of the Concord group fairly swim in their openings, particularly those in the upper cases of the chests in Plates I and IV, where there are no lateral guides.