Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Early American Furniture: Who, What, When, Where, and Why? Season 2, Episode 1
46 Plays4 years ago
Join us in the season 2 opener for the who, what, when, where, and why of Early American Furniture.
10% off your order from Montana Brand Tools:
https://www.montanabrandtools.com/discount/AMERICANCRAFTSMAN
Greene Street Joinery is a custom design & build shop located in Monmouth County, New Jersey. We build multigenerational furniture with an eco-friendly and sustainable mindset.
Inspired and guided by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, we believe in the use of traditional craftsmanship and simple, well-proportioned forms; sustainability and ethical practices; and importantly, taking pleasure in our work as craftsmen to create quality pieces of enduring value.
Follow us!
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greene_st_joinery Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/greenestreetjoinery
Support us on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/Greene_st_joinery
Visit Us at https://www.greenestreetjoinery.com/
And be sure to Subscribe to our channel for more videos like this one!
Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-american-craftsman-podcast/donations
Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Partnership and Tools
00:00:21
Speaker
Green Street Joinery and the American Craftsmen Podcast are proud to partner with Montana Brand Tools. Montana Brand Tools are manufactured by Rocky Mountain Twist in Montana, USA. With numerous patents dating back to the invention of the hex shank system by our founders, we strive to produce accessories that add precision, flexibility, and efficiency to your toolkit.
00:00:41
Speaker
In addition to woodworking tools, we produce many high-quality cutting tools that are used by the aerospace, medical, automotive, and industrial markets. Our end product has a fit and finish that is beyond comparison. Montana Brand tools are guaranteed for life to be free of defects in material and workmanship because we build these tools with pride and determination. For 10% off your order, visit MontanaBrandTools.com and use the coupon code American Craftsman.
00:01:07
Speaker
All right, you ready? I'm ready, I guess. You guys ready? Ready for season two, episode one of the American Craftsman podcast? Yeah, we got a whole new thing going. Yeah, completely new. So I hope it goes well. Yeah, me too. Who knows what will go wrong because something is inevitably going to go wrong.
Season Two: Exploring American Furniture Design
00:01:32
Speaker
Yeah, so we're going to go through American furniture design. Yeah, so for the next year, we're going to be talking about the 12 periods of American furniture. Yeah. Starting today with the early American period and then going all the way to, you know, contemporary design. So what's going on right now? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, this one's going to sound a little bit like a sixth grade social studies class. Yeah.
00:02:00
Speaker
kind of lay the foundation the hooves and the wares and all that stuff because you know that's always important to know where we came from yeah i mean we learned a lot um just doing the research for this first first um set of episodes so i mean you see
00:02:19
Speaker
This is just one of four packets that we have for today. You might notice the look of the podcast is a little bit different. We're messing around with cameras and camera settings and putting a little thing in the background, trying to make it look a little bit nicer. We're going to definitely be incorporating more visual aids into the podcast because it's furniture, it's visual. You need to see what we're talking about.
00:02:48
Speaker
urge you to check out the podcast on YouTube, urge you to join the Patreon because we're going to be giving the patrons all of this information with all of the source material. So you'll be able to go back and use these, you know, in your own education and be able to, you know, see where we got the information and do some research. Do your own research. That's a 2021. I mean, we spent many hours digging this stuff up.
00:03:18
Speaker
It was pretty exhausting, so. Yeah, computer work is harder than woodwork. Yeah, and especially, you know, we're going back to the, this is, we're talking 1600s, 1700s, 1600s.
Colonial Influences on American Design
00:03:34
Speaker
So, like, you have to really sift through a lot of stuff to get the good information. Yeah, it's not like, you know, today the information isn't infinite.
00:03:44
Speaker
Right you don't we have to cross check everything make sure you're getting the same story in a couple of places and use reputable sources. And you may.
00:03:59
Speaker
as you listen you may notice so like today we're sitting down we're gonna film all four episodes for this yeah um early american period so that's sort of the new format if if if we talk and it seems disjointed like you're like oh yeah this week you guys
00:04:16
Speaker
Like if you when you listen to episode four, that's going to be a month from now. So just to fill you in. So you're going to shoot Jeopardy style. You know, they do the whole week in one day. Oh, do they really? I know they do multiple shows. They might like film like in two days or something. Yeah. Oh, that makes sense because, yeah, returning for the 10th week is Ken Jennings like this guy would take off for work for two months.
00:04:44
Speaker
You know, the guy on there now is closing in on a million bucks. Wow. He's won, I just saw last night, like 24, 26 shows, something like that. Wow. You need to start bumping those numbers up. That's like, that's like chump change for a game show these days, a million bucks. It gets a little boring, though, when it's the same guy always winning. Yeah. Nerd. Yeah. Somebody needs to throw him a beating.
00:05:12
Speaker
Well, let's not waste any time. We're going to get into this. So we sort of split these up. So Rob is going to be the leader of the pack on this one. Yeah. And we'll sort of switch on and off.
00:05:25
Speaker
So as Jeff said, we're going early American today. That's the beginning of American furniture. And when this happened, we're looking at 1640 to about 1700 when it starts to grow into the next phase, which I think was colonial.
00:05:52
Speaker
1640 is really just the beginning of the colonization of the United States, so it makes sense. Those of us who are listening from here in the States, we know or should know most of these things.
00:06:09
Speaker
But we do have listeners in Australia and in Europe and stuff like that. Slovenia. That's right. We're big in Slovenia. So what's going on in the 1600s, the mid 1600s, is there's a migration to what becomes the colonies on the east coast of America. And we're talking about the states that would become Virginia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
00:06:38
Speaker
New Hampshire, New Jersey where we are right here, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, North and South Carolina, and Georgia.
00:06:48
Speaker
You just confused the hell out of me because you went out of order. Yeah. What you have written down here. Yeah. I substitute a Maryland and Massachusetts to begin with. I just started freewheeling it. I would I would have got so lost if I was trying to do that. We should preface this by saying in between being a chef and a woodworker. I was a history teacher.
00:07:15
Speaker
So some of this was kind of old hat to me, even though I taught high school. We did go over this stuff. American history was split into two terms in high school, as we all remember.
00:07:29
Speaker
So we're basically looking at the Atlantic coast and all the action is happening in the North Atlantic coast as far as furniture. Even though you have Jamestown and important colonies that are happening like in Virginia, Maryland, and the Carolinas.
00:07:50
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, Roanoke. They're importing still. They're bringing a lot of their stuff over from England, primarily. I think it was pretty sparsely populated down there. Even in the Northeast and the New England area was the hotspot, even that was sparsely populated. Right, right. You have Boston and Philadelphia, I think are the two main cities that start to
00:08:17
Speaker
to populate. And that's where most of the the furniture creating started to develop. Right. My notes tell me here that the craft is really growing in and around Boston, Salem and Charleston, these three cities in in the Boston area, Massachusetts.
00:08:46
Speaker
We got 20 joiners, 30 turners in the mid 1600s. So you are talking just a handful of people. And we'll get into the difference between a joiner and a turner. And then as you're closing in on the end of the century, looking at about 60 furniture makers. The Handicrafts Guild. Yeah.
00:09:12
Speaker
So that was like a I guess, you know a modern or a The modern version that would be like the woodworkers guild or something. Yeah, you know they had a system back then for passing the craft on which It'd be great if we had something like that today, yeah
00:09:32
Speaker
And that's something we'll probably do as we're going through this and we're finding our ways. We're going to compare and contrast what we're doing today and how this period has definitely affected us. We can draw a straight line through it.
00:09:51
Speaker
So, we're setting up when and where, and so now why? Why furniture? And, you know, we kind of take it for granted nowadays, don't we? Yeah. Well, maybe we don't. Even we do, but... Like in our home and stuff. The layperson really takes it for granted. Right. Like, think about when you move. You move your first time out of the house.
00:10:20
Speaker
You take a couple of hand-me-downs with you, right? Your parents give you a dresser. You take your old bed with you. Yep. The old kitchen table that was in, you know, in the garage. It's all beat up.
00:10:34
Speaker
So that's kind of what's going on as people are getting on a boat and coming over to the colonies. And they're taking a few things with them. We'll get into that. But why did they start building furniture?
Independent Development of American Furniture
00:10:54
Speaker
mostly out of necessity here in the Americas. People didn't come with much. If you're gonna get on a boat and start out in a new place, new world, chances are
00:11:13
Speaker
Things aren't the you're not some of the upper crust. Yeah, typically that's not the case. Yeah, especially these first people who came right. Right. You'll see in the future, you know, getting probably closer to the 1700s when people with with money and power start to they see an opportunity in the new world to to leverage that money and power even more.
00:11:35
Speaker
Right, once the grunt work has been done in the colony. The noble person isn't coming here when it hasn't been settled.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah. So as I was getting back into my role of history teacher, I wrote down why did furniture develop an independent form in the Americas? And market demands was one of the one of the things. And we don't really think about it that way, but it's kind of like today.
00:12:11
Speaker
Like, how many times do we get a request for a quote and it looks just like the last request for a quote? All the time. Basically all of them. So, you know, it's market demands.
00:12:26
Speaker
Uh, even, uh, as people are just setting out on a new life, there's still market demands. They're just a little bit different nowadays. It's, you know, it's mostly what's the hot trend and how much money do people have to spend?
00:12:45
Speaker
And so there's market demands like that in the colonies. People need certain things. There's only a few people that can make them. We'll make, we need stools. We'll make those ourselves. We need something to sit on.
00:13:02
Speaker
We need a table. Well, we might be able to hire somebody out to do something like that. And it starts to develop an independent form in the Americas because also there's distance from Europe. Initially everything's influenced by where they came from.
00:13:22
Speaker
But, you know, with the scarcity of skilled labor, even the tools to make these things, the designs, the European designs kind of get pared down, simplified a little bit. Yeah, I mean, you think you have, even at the height, 60 furniture makers, and let's say you have 90 woodturners if you're scaling that up from 20 and 30 equally.
00:13:47
Speaker
That's for the entire colonial United States. You know, that's 13 colonies with, I mean, there's got to be a couple thousand people per colony at this point. So, you know, talking under 200 people to create all the furniture for these thousands of people.
00:14:06
Speaker
Right. Right. A lot of the stuff was was done by farmers. And it's the vernacular furniture. Yeah. Yeah. Which you could see here. Anarchist design book. A great great book about vernacular furniture. He doesn't touch really on the the early American period. More the European kind of stuff. But it all ties into this. So.
00:14:35
Speaker
We're looking at why stuff developed in America is differently and as life gains permanence, people get a little bit more prosperous, they want nicer things, and it's not much different from today. Trends begin. People with certain skill sets start churning out furniture, becomes popular, and we'll get into all those guys.
00:15:01
Speaker
You know, I had no idea they went back that far. Yeah. And people wanted to show off. Yeah. I mean, when you first get here and you have to you have to build something to live in and you're fighting off, you know, wild animals and and, you know, being attacked by the natives who are like, what are you doing here? You're not worried about making like a really nice piece of furniture. Right. Right.
00:15:31
Speaker
So I found out that a lot of the early guys migrated all the early like furniture makers migrated over from shipbuilding. You know, they all came over. That was that was the trade.
00:15:48
Speaker
But the economy of being a shipbuilder wasn't really working out. Ships had to be moving back and forth. They needed less shipbuilders. It was more of a one-way trip here. Then the ship went back to get more people.
00:16:06
Speaker
They needed home builders. So these guys started building homes. They used their joinery skills into putting homes together. And you can follow the next step into them opening up a shop and becoming a furniture maker. So this one really reminded me of like grade school. So who's coming over here?
00:16:32
Speaker
We're gonna probably mention the Great Migration a couple of times. 1600s of Puritans.
00:16:41
Speaker
pilgrims. They're slightly different groups. They both had problems with the Catholic Church. So they're Protestants. And about 21,000 pilgrims and Puritans come over to the colonies. And you're one of them. 16 million descendants from that small group. Yeah, that's crazy.
00:17:09
Speaker
So right off the bat, you got to look at how they're going to influence how this furniture design develops. It's like everything else. And the Puritans were super religious.
00:17:26
Speaker
Another thing was they were probably the most literate group in maybe the whole world at the time. You know, as a community, as a consolidated community, reading and writing the reading and interpreting the Bible was so important to them. And because they had problems with the church, they wanted to be able to do it independently.
00:17:47
Speaker
Yeah, which is like the complete opposite of the way most sex of religion work because they wanted just the upper crust of the hierarchy of the church to be able to disseminate the information in the Bible to the people as a form of control, basically. Exactly. Say, no, no, no. We're going to tell you what this says. It's like having a kid. It's very paternalistic.
00:18:16
Speaker
Uh, here's something I didn't know that they started Harvard. Wow. And apparently only six years after that first community started. Wow. So, um, that's one of the legacies. Uh, and, uh, this is some of the things that
00:18:35
Speaker
You know, being a Puritan, that was kind of like an epithet. That's that was like a derogatory name that their detractors gave them. Well, I didn't know that either. And they really weren't. So it's my notes here say they were not dour, killjoys.
00:19:00
Speaker
now. So let's dumb that down for the. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They were really religious. They, they, you know, the Bible kind of was the, the big factor in their lives and in a community, but they didn't all wear black.
00:19:23
Speaker
They loved color. They loved decorative objects and They they were They weren't afraid of showing off a little bit of you know, they're let's say newfound wealth or how they were doing So they were good customers Really they were educated. Mm-hmm. They they liked nice things and
00:19:52
Speaker
you know, they were prosperous because here's something we probably all heard, the Puritan work ethic, right? Self-reliance, political localism, those are all things that they left us. So they're good.
00:20:09
Speaker
customers for furniture to be built yeah we gotta find we gotta find some puritans and it you know so it was the Puritan it was all Puritans here basically yeah
00:20:25
Speaker
They really weren't in the trades. Although you can't make a blanket statement like that, but for the most part, so they were consumers of these things. But they were the bulk of the customers because the rest of the guys that come over are mostly like, they're not families like the Puritans. You have a family group, you have a community, you're gonna need all the furnishings for a home.
00:20:54
Speaker
If you're a guy that's coming over because he thinks the streets are paved with gold, not yet. You're not so inclined to settle in, buy furniture. And permanence is part of what builds the need for furniture, which drives design and all this other stuff. So who made the furniture in the colonies? We went over this just briefly, the shipbuilders.
00:21:26
Speaker
turn to home builders, turn to furniture builders. And then of course there's the guys that come over who are the super skilled craftsmen. I mean,
00:21:38
Speaker
when we started doing this research, we were kind of thinking, well, everything's going to be really rudimentary. You know, you're going to have like turned stools with pegs driven in and like, you know, really rough shot kind of things. And then as we were looking through the museum pieces. Yeah.
Skills and Craftsmanship in Colonial America
00:22:00
Speaker
There's really, really gorgeous, exquisite work that was made at this time period, mid 1600s, that we probably would have a hard time replicating today. I mean, only the most skilled people could do it. So back then, if you were considered a skilled craftsman,
00:22:28
Speaker
You could build your house and you could furnish it.
00:22:35
Speaker
You can't get people to change the label these days. You had to be good at math. You had to know your history of design, which, you know, back then it was a lot of classical stuff, you know, the Greeks and all. And we lean on that today. I mean, the golden ratio and all that stuff. Time tested. Yeah. You had to know about wood. Tree, from the tree. I mean, you went out and cut a tree down.
00:23:03
Speaker
Yeah. And then you had to dry it. You had to split it. You know, you had to do all these things. We think we're, um, you know, starting from the beginning because we get off. Yeah. We have to join and play. Yeah. If there were, you know, 60, 60 furniture makers, how many Sawyer's were there? Right.
00:23:31
Speaker
Yeah. All this stuff is interconnected. Um, so you had to know about math. You had to know about angles, proportion, um, you know, trees, understanding wood and its qualities, its movements.
00:23:48
Speaker
Finishes and you had to be able to run a business. Yeah, as we know that's not simple and The the basic elements are still the same. I mean we have to be the chief cook and bottle washer Yeah, and so imagine being a guy in You know colonial America doing our job
00:24:14
Speaker
But having to do so many more steps in the process, worried about putting food on the table in a completely different sense. Yeah, I mean, you know.
00:24:30
Speaker
You had to do everything back then. Yeah. You know, he had to go out and hunt for your food. And, you know, there was no supermarket in 1650. No, no. And he had to go into the forest, choose a tree based on its, you know, its growing patterns, its age, its size, fell it, all with the idea that in a few years time, this tree will be ready to make something from it.
00:25:00
Speaker
I mean, talk about the planning. Yeah, and I guess there must have been, you know, some Greenwood working in the beginning because there was no time to wait. No, you know, that's where all the turning comes from. Yeah. So all the skilled guys, they were direct immigrants from Europe, mostly Britain. Yep.
00:25:24
Speaker
And they came over and they did their best to bring their trade with them. If they were fortunate enough to be able to bring all their tools. But chances are it's like, you know, the guy who leaves
00:25:43
Speaker
It's probably not the best guy in town. You know, if you have this well-established business, you know, are you going to leave it to get on a boat to go to this completely, you know, unknown this crapshoot of a place they're calling America? Yeah. I mean, unless you're a Puritan, probably not. Right. You know, because they're facing persecution.
00:26:08
Speaker
Right. So there's there's a handful of guys that come over that know what they're doing and they're making all those pieces that we see in the museums today. There there are a few. There's still still a few pieces around here. The Met seems to have quite a bit. Yeah.
00:26:27
Speaker
So and on the other end of the spectrum, you got the local guys, the farmers, the settlers themselves. They're making all those rudimentary pieces that we kind of thought of. Yeah, there's still guys like that. That's our competition.
00:26:47
Speaker
You know, drawing some parallels here to the press. Yeah, we could we could take a minute to kind of You know instead of just going on we could take a few minutes to talk about how a lot of these things are still You know contemporary issues or scenarios Yeah
00:27:12
Speaker
You have a limited number of skilled people working to build things for a limited audience. Most people are kind of doing the handyman, you know, Home Depot, get it cheap kind of thing. Yeah. So now much has changed, has it? No, unfortunately not.
00:27:37
Speaker
Um, so we're building a background of like who and where and what we haven't really touched onto any of the design elements yet, but we'll get there. Um, back then you had two kinds of, uh,
00:27:55
Speaker
woodworkers called furniture makers. You had your joiners and you had your turners. Joiners, and we're Green Street joinery. A lot of people don't get that sort of nomenclature. The joiners were the people who
00:28:16
Speaker
you know, took a couple of straight pieces of wood. Well, they had to make them straight first and create joinery, like such as a mortise and tenon, things like that, and join them together. That took more skill. The turners, and I guess this is where the Greenwood furniture comes in. You know, they were they were turning furniture. A lot of stools were made that way. You know, three or four round legs.
00:28:46
Speaker
drill a couple of holes in a blank of wood and then pin it at the top with like a wedge.
00:28:55
Speaker
So they were churning those things out, took less skill. And I guess there was more material available for those guys. It was a lot faster to produce something like that. And as we know, time is money. So those things were bought up, too. It took less skill to make it, and you could sell it for a lot less money.
00:29:23
Speaker
We're going to get into some folks of note, but there were a couple of guys that popped up as some of the earliest, earliest cabinet makers of note that came over from England. There was William Searle and Thomas Dennis. Now these guys came over in the 1660s.
00:29:45
Speaker
and they came from Devonshire, England. So they brought the, that's a great word that you use, the vernacular style of Devon to Massachusetts. And that was a big factor in the initial starting point, in the starting point of like this early American design, because it influenced everybody.
00:30:13
Speaker
Searle, I find out, he dies right away. And Dennis marries his widow. And Dennis was not really an apprentice or anything like that of Searle's. He was a contemporary peer. And in fact, as research goes on and on, it's hard to decipher whose work was whose.
00:30:42
Speaker
Dennis was an expert carver and joiner and his stuff is starting to get a little bit of its own renown, I'll call it. That might be too big of a word, but he's separated himself from Searle a bit. And the other guy I'll mention, who came out even earlier in 1636,
00:31:05
Speaker
He opened the shop, this guy was John Simons, and he had two sons, and the two sons had three apprentices. Well, that's very early too. You know, Mayflower's what, 1620?
00:31:21
Speaker
Right, right, exactly. So that's why I wanted to bring this guy up because this is how you see the trade starting. This is how it happened. I got a little bit of information here on The Apprentice, not the TV show.
00:31:39
Speaker
And we know a little bit about this because we've tried in vain to bring people in. I'd love to hear any listener who's had some experience with this. We know that what's his real name out in Australia is serving as an apprentice.
00:32:03
Speaker
Jack Thornton? Yeah, Jack Thornton. Beaver Badger? Is that Beaver Badger? No, that's common. Jack Thornton, 98. Jack Thornton, 98. Yeah. So these apprentices would start at the age of 14, if you could imagine that. That's a full grown man in the 1600s. You got about 14 years left before you die.
00:32:27
Speaker
They started yet. They started Jeff 14 cause they figured you would done at 21. Um, they wanted you for seven years and, um,
00:32:39
Speaker
It says here that they they usually didn't make it the full seven Maybe it was the shorter lifespan Maybe it was the need for more people to you know, fill these roles once you had four or five years under your belt You felt like you could move to another town Take your skill set with you Salud and get going So
00:33:08
Speaker
it get this it wasn't uncommon for a master to charge parents or an apprentice a fee boy wouldn't wouldn't we love that yeah it would make it a possibility yeah because i mean we've run into this just trying to hire help um it costs us money to have somebody help in the shop yeah and margins are so tight as anybody who's running a small business like ours knows
00:33:36
Speaker
We can't afford to train somebody.
00:33:40
Speaker
And you really can't afford to pay a skilled person either. That's why you're kind of like owner operator. Because we put in the hours that we couldn't afford to pay somebody for. We couldn't get somebody to work for what we pay ourselves. We won't go hourly, right? Yeah. And then, yeah, you factor in all the taxes and stuff like that. Insurance liability, it goes through the roof, the price.
00:34:07
Speaker
Uh, I found that if you were an orphan, you know, a lot of times if you were lucky enough, you'd wind up in an apprenticeship program, but you had to pay. So that, that probably got worked out after you finished, you know, because you had nothing, you came in with nothing like indentured servitude. Yeah. So, um, if we had an apprentice, we would be providing them with room and board. So maybe a little caught in the shop.
00:34:34
Speaker
Yeah, we can do that if you're interested. And then it's kind of like getting out of prison here, because at the end you got a little bit of money in your tools. Like in the movies when the guys get out of prison, they get the new suit and everything. That's how you work for seven years. Here you go, Joe.
00:35:00
Speaker
And occasionally they got a little stipend their last few years as they were getting more skilled. And the apprenticeship was a legal contract. The apprentice agreed to keep our secrets, our trade secrets. And if the apprentice wanted to go out or do anything like that, they had to ask us.
00:35:24
Speaker
They had a promise to, you know, stay out of trouble. No carousing stay out. In those days it was the tavern, you know, stay out of tavern. Don't get into any trouble. And you agree to work without pay for the term of the contract.
00:35:46
Speaker
And on the other side, it listed what we would be giving to the apprentice. We would provide a basic education as well as, you know, teaching them woodworking skills, how to read, write, do math, because as we know,
00:36:03
Speaker
without being able to do all those things as well, we really can't run a business. Right. And that's what the apprentice is really going to do. Once he leaves the master, he's going to put his own shingle out. So he's got to know how to read. He's got to know how to write. He's got to be able to present to a client. He's got to be able to do math, keep books, let alone how to, you know, use math for building furniture.
00:36:33
Speaker
And if you're good, you got a set of clothes.
00:36:40
Speaker
We'd be handing out a Calavera apron, wouldn't we? Well, it depends on how good you are. Yeah. Well, after seven years, you know, it's funny because I had a Christopher working for me for about seven years, but it wasn't full time. You know, he'd come in after school and sweep off and things like that. But I can see the progression because at first he was just
00:37:03
Speaker
cleaning. And then gradually I'd leave piles of stuff for him to sand and I'd have to instruct them initially. And then it got to be a great thing where, let's say you had a bunch of shelves or
00:37:22
Speaker
draw boxes. You need the edges broken. You just leave a note and go break the edges on all this stuff and you come into the morning like magic. It's done. Yeah. Shop elves. Yeah. The shop was clean. Um, it was a great time. Uh,
00:37:42
Speaker
And I just listed a couple of, you know, basic tools. We're going to get more into this in like the third episode. But it was curious, you know, some of the tools that the cabinet maker had for measuring. Basically, they use story poles, story sticks for everything. And they would save them.
00:38:06
Speaker
Up on the walls and things like that because let's say you know i had a cabinet bill and needed repair something like that that's where all their notes were kept.
00:38:16
Speaker
Yeah, and the things were kind of standardized. I have a book back there about door making and that's how, you know, everything is laid out off of story poles. Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty cool. I'm gonna put a flame under your ass because we're only two pages in and we're 40. We're around 40 minutes. Oh my God. Yeah, you got about four pages left. All right. Let's speed it up. Let's pick up the tempo. So, um,
00:38:44
Speaker
I wanted to mention those things just to briefly compare and contrast today. Everything was done by hand, the smoothing planes, the shaping planes, the turning with lays. That's pretty much the same. Hide glues and everything. Imagine drilling holes by hand.
00:39:12
Speaker
A lot less, granted they're doing a lot less, you know, we're drilling and putting in screws all over the place and they were relying on hand cut joinery more, but yeah, especially the guys who did turning, all those staked pieces of furniture, you got to drill all those holes.
00:39:28
Speaker
Yeah. So, um, well, so we got, you know, when, where, why, who, um, the guys had the, you know, although there were some skilled cabinet makers, mostly bunch of,
00:39:45
Speaker
rookies. And things weren't short supply in the colonies. So as better tools emerged, better availability of tools, furniture got better.
00:40:01
Speaker
So let's get into the design of early tools, not, sorry, early furniture.
Significant Early American Furniture Designs
00:40:09
Speaker
The chest was really the most popular and important piece of furniture. Yeah, it was a lot of what people brought over too. Right. Was just a chest.
00:40:19
Speaker
And is, you know, as simple as form as a box. Of course, you can just like today, we can take that box and we can make it as ornate as we, you know, are capable of or paid to do.
00:40:38
Speaker
The chest turns into, you know, the high boy, the low boy, and what we would call chest of drawers now. And the other piece of furniture that I found was pretty important in the development of design and furniture making business was the cane chair. Now, it was done, it was important for a different reason.
00:41:06
Speaker
Now the cane chair, these guys figured out, hey, if we pool our talents, if the turner turns the front legs and the joiner creates the joinery on the back legs and the seat and the caner, the guy who does the weaving of the seat, he does his thing. The finisher will finish it. We can make these chairs
00:41:30
Speaker
And not only sell them locally, we could sell them to all the other people in the colonies. Right. So, uh... The production style. Right. That's why the cane chair was considered an important development. Not because it was so stylistically important, but because of the mindset it created.
00:41:56
Speaker
So let's get into the two major types of furniture design. This is what everybody's been waiting for. Shut up, Rob. What was the design? It was all based on, and I'm going to let you say it so I don't mess it up. Jacobian? Jacobian. That's right. That's James I. Jacobian is Latin for King James I. He ruled from 1603 to 1625.
00:42:20
Speaker
And the Carolin, which was for Charles II, 1660 to 1685, was his reign. And in the middle, you had Oliver Cromwell, who was a Puritan. So what's Jacobian design? Really blocky, rectilinear, heavy proportions. And somebody's calling you. Yeah. Oh, it's Chapel Hill Dentistry.
00:42:48
Speaker
Rob goes to dentist more times in a year than most people go in a decade. Yeah, that's, I had to cancel my cleaning appointment. They're not taking my insurance. I had to find a new dentist. Now they want to know why.
00:43:03
Speaker
Can't we just can't you just come in and charge a full price? No, no, no. So. And Jacobian Jacobian Jacobian Jacobian design. So it's heavy. It's if it's decorated, it's got a lot of scroll work, carvings. And if you saw a picture of it, you'd recognize it immediately. That may be not by name, but you'd see it. It'd be it'd look like an old
00:43:33
Speaker
church chair or a chair that a king would sit in, like really heavy in that sense.
00:43:43
Speaker
And the carillon design is sort of more flamboyant. What happens is James is, I don't know how his reign ended, but Alva Cromwell, a Puritan, took over and he was like trying to simplify everything and design followed suit because
00:44:09
Speaker
This is the way things happen. Socioeconomic conditions can dictate these things. So Charles II comes back into power and he was in exile in France. So he's influenced by the more florid designs and things like that. So all this stuff is trickling down
00:44:34
Speaker
to the American colonies. If they brought something with them, chances are it was Jacobian. Jacobian. Jacobian. We'll get it by episode four.
00:44:57
Speaker
And as the colonies are starting to prosper, people are staying put, they're in need of furniture and want of furniture. Now this new design from Europe, and let's face it, that's where, you know, if you were considered stylish,
00:45:19
Speaker
you were looking to Europe for your design cues. And that's where everybody was from. Right. Like today where you could be from England and you know about what what the hot trend is in China. Well it wasn't you know the information didn't flow as fluidly back. No no. And so then these designs are sort of Americanized.
Evolution of American Furniture Styles
00:45:44
Speaker
They become a little bit lighter for portability sake. A little bit simpler in design. That could be due to the fact that there are less skilled people making them. So they're doing their best at mimicking. It's like if we were going to make a green and green piece, we would do our damnedest.
00:46:09
Speaker
We could look at that at the end and go, we're not green. We're not the whole brothers. We'd try, but we would probably go, they're not paying us to do this amount of detail. So some of that was necessitated by cost.
00:46:31
Speaker
greater flexibility in design. People needed to be able to use something for more than one thing at times in the colonies. And this became known as pilgrim design. So you got your, your basis in Jacobian, Jacobian design.
00:46:54
Speaker
Cromwell's puritanical influence is there in the middle. The Carolin design comes in towards the end of this early American period and it's all mashed together and becomes pilgrim design. So I'll summarize and say that the early American furniture design was influenced by circumstances
00:47:20
Speaker
environment necessity ties to the old world and finally a growing prosperity. You could see how those things are really evident in what we do today. Yeah.
00:47:37
Speaker
People's circumstances, the environment, their necessity, ties to, instead of the old world, you could put ties to Instagram, Pinterest, you know, what's happening out there in, you know, the world. Yeah, I mean, those are really the foundations of good design.
00:48:00
Speaker
Right, right. And growing prosperity. So I hope we were able to lay the groundwork and not become too tedious. No, I don't think so. Yeah. What do you think of that? I mean, what are your impressions?
00:48:25
Speaker
I mean, I'm really still digesting all the information from our own research. I know. It's a lot, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. And we're just scratching the surface. And we could see the pace has to be picked up. Well, no, I mean, we're sitting in about right where we want to be.
00:48:43
Speaker
Yeah, the biggest surprise to me is you know how quickly they went from the sort of necessity type vernacular furniture to more ornate things like you're talking about a decade or two and things are really yeah to be you know more designed more for appearance. That's a great point because it happened fast didn't it?
00:49:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, talking by 1816, 60, you know, things are really shifting towards a more ornate piece of furniture. People want stuff to look good. They want to show off a little bit. They want, hey, man, look what I got over here. Yeah. And, you know, 1620 is the the Mayflower. But you really don't see a large migration starting until like the late 1630s and 1640s. So.
00:49:34
Speaker
Right. I think the with the pilgrims first and then the Puritans followed. I think so. The pilgrims were Puritans. Yeah. The one group wanted to separate from the church. Yeah. Well, we'll get into that in the next episode.
00:49:48
Speaker
We're going to talk about the great purity migration. The first was the separatists. The non-separatists wanted to not separate, but then, as we'll find out, they really didn't have a choice.
00:50:09
Speaker
It's funny, my impressions were that there's so much that is the same. The more things change, the more they stay the same as the saying goes, right? Talking 350 years ago. Right. Like the things that drive our business and we're a design driven business, whether we're working for a designer or we're designing ourself, that's really our niche. If people want something off the shelf, let me go get it off the shelf.
00:50:39
Speaker
Right. They could find that cheaply, inexpensively. They come to us because they need something different. They want something different. They want something nicer, possibly more ornate. It's all the same things that drove the early furniture makers business and their design. Yeah. I mean, we're building on what came before, just like they had their early influences.
00:51:09
Speaker
Yeah, and this goes, you know, this didn't start with early Amer- I mean, this goes back from the beginning. We're talking a millennia ago. We just had to pick a starting point. Well, yeah, and it's the American Craftsman podcast, so we're doing Amer- you know, maybe we'll get into you Europeans next season. You know what else surprised me? That early Americans the first and colonial is the second.
00:51:34
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, because, you know, they weren't they weren't really colonies right at the beginning, I guess. Right. I would have thought the names would be switched around. It wasn't until like England started getting re-involved with these people that, you know, I guess they became more more quote unquote colonies.
00:51:56
Speaker
Yeah, and you know what else is curious? New England is still kind of the center, like the North Bennett School. If you want to learn classical furniture building, that's where you go, up to that area.
00:52:11
Speaker
Yeah. It's the birthplace of America. So all these things, it seems like it's a long, long time ago, but all this stuff is, you could see the thread. Yeah. Yeah, that's for sure. You know, it was a great learning experience.
00:52:33
Speaker
Yeah. And I'm sure we'll see the maybe the format and the episode structure maybe evolve a little bit as we go. Yeah, we're trying to find our feed here. Yeah, you know, as usual, we just fly by the seat of our pants.
00:52:49
Speaker
Next episode we're gonna get into a person of interest. Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Sorry to interrupt you. That's a good one. Yeah So yeah, we hope you liked the the new format the news sort of subject matter and Like I said, check out the podcast on YouTube Check out the patreon leave us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify if you feel so inclined
00:53:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to be important that to get some feedback as we're trying to shift and, you know, our presentation methods and all these other things, because we're fluid. Oh, yeah. Let us know what you think. Yeah. Well, we hope you enjoyed. We'll see you next week for season two, episode two of the American Crescent podcast. Take care.
00:53:57
Speaker
Ain't no shame, but there's been a chain