A group of Concord, Massachusetts, furniture

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by David F. Wood

The drawer supports in the Concord group also have unusual features. Normally in the lower cases of high chests these are tenoned into or through the backboard, whereas here a horizontal board is nailed to the backboard and the drawer supports rest on top of this board or in notches cut into it (see Pl. VIIIa). In the upper cases of the high chests with flanking pilasters, the drawer supports are attached at the back to a vertical stile that is nailed and tenoned into place.

There is considerable variety in the way the upper cases of New England high chests are supported. Sometimes they rest on the sides of the case, sometimes on a waist molding, on the backboard and legs, or other combinations. In the group under consideration the maker has introduced braces of various patterns (see Pls. VII, VIIIa, IX), although their intended function is not apparent since in none of the high chests do the braces actually support the upper case. The upper case of the chest on chest in Plate I rests on the top of the lower case, which is a single pine board, although oddly enough the lower case of this chest has no bottom board. Instead, maple side mils are tenoned into oak rails at front and back, which are in turn tenoned into the sides of the case. The inner foot elements are nailed into the side rails and the outer foot elements are tenoned into the base molding, which is then nailed into the sides and the front rail. The central drop is also tenoned into the base molding. These unusual features seem to be aimed at avoiding the use of glue. In addition, the two-board drawer bottoms of the chests in Plates II and X, rather than being butted and glued, are secured by two sections of iron wire that function as dowels. The two-board sides of the lower cases of the chests in Plates IV and X are joined by wooden dowels. The table base in Plate V also has some peculiar sliding elements on its underside that may have been intended to secure a top without glue blocks.

The construction methods for dovetails, drawers, drawer supports, upper case supports, and glueless joinery are both consistent within the group and consistently at variance with Boston practice. The maker's use of wood is also uniformly unusual. The primary woods in all cases are cherry or maple. That on the chests in Plates I, IV, and X is remarkably bad - full of knots in all three cases; and in the objects in Plates I, IV, and V, worm eaten before it was used By contrast the primary wood used on the high chests in Plates II and VI is of very high quality, although the maker seems not really to have recognized this since he also used it for the upper backboard of the chest in Plate VI, where one would expect to find a secondary wood. The uses of secondary woods themselves are equally idiosyncratic. On the chest in Plate X the vertical elements of the drawer supports are oak; on the one in Plate IV, they are maple; and on the one in Plate I they are oak on one side and pine on the other. On the latter chest one of the drawer backs is elm, a wood that is hard to work in any dimension.(12) The back of the lower case of the chest in Plate II consists of a thick slab of maple. Most of the drawer liners are white pine, often knotty, and many of them weathered before they were worked - a characteristic they share with many of the pine backboards.