The nineteenth-century furniture trade in New Orleans

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Stephen G. Harrison

One source for many of the bedsteads sold by both McCracken and Sampson was Charles Lee of Manchester, Massachusetts. Once thought to have been a free man of color working for Mallard, Lee made bedsteads for the southern market in Manchester,(24) where he worked from about 1856 to about 1868, employing eighteen men in a shop partially powered by steam [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. He had a lucrative business before the Civil War, but his most profitable years were immediately after it. In 1867 alone he shipped more than 155 cases of bedsteads to twelve New Orleans retailers, including Sampson and the McCrackens. Ironically, Mallard was not one of his customers, although it is to him that Lee is most closely linked in myth. Many of Lee's bedsteads marked with his incised stamp [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURES 3, 4 OMITTED] still survive in the Deep South. Similar unmarked bedsteads have also surfaced, but they are more probably from a competitor such as Daniel Kelham of Kelham and Fitz (w.c. 1843-1874), who also had a manufactory in Manchester and maintained a retail shop in New Orleans as well.

The 1870s were marked by the prominence of Mitchell and Rammelsberg not only in New Orleans but throughout the country.(25) The shift in furniture production to the Midwest forced many small operations such as those in Manchester to fold. To compete, Mallard continued to market himself to prosperous customers as the most fashionable importer and manufacturer of furniture. Several pieces of furniture from this period have come to light that are in completely different styles from the rococo revival most often associated with his shop (Pls. I, XII, XIII, XV). They illustrate Mallard's ability to adapt to the changing tastes of his clients. The paper labels on these pieces state that they were "MANUFACTURED BY P. MALLARD." However, the character of his shop suggests otherwise. Moreover, an editorial in the April 29, 1871, issue of the Cabinetmaker, a trade journal, indicates that the practice of dealers advertising themselves as manufacturers was both fraudulent and widespread:

Why does every furniture dealer in the country advertise himself as a manufacturer?...For wholesale dealers and jobbers who...do not even own a cent's worth of interest in a manufactory, it is simply a fraud. If there is any advantage in manufacturing, the firms who invest their money in buildings, stock, machinery, and labor, are entitled to that advantage; if there is no such advantage, why claim such an empty honor by advertising yourselves as manufacturers, when you are simply wholesale dealers?

Despite his misleading labels, Mallard could not compete financially with the rapid growth in mass-produced and secondhand furniture by the mid-1870s. In addition, most of his former clients had been ruined by the war. His career as the most fashionable purveyor of household furnishings in New Orleans came to a close in 1874.

One of the largest buildings at the World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition held in New Orleans in 1884-1885 was the Grand Rapids Furniture Pavilion, where visitors could see the latest in mass-produced American furniture. Where once the store fronts on Royal Street displayed hand-carved imported merchandise, they now carried the cheapest furniture in the South [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 5 OMITTED].