Connecticut: Where forty miles made the difference

Connecticut: Where forty miles made the difference
Arthur Liverant and Kevin Tulimieri in conversation with John Fiske

Arthur Liverant chose to center our discussion of Connecticut furniture on two bureaus, and, in particular, on parts of them that we do not normally see. So Kevin Tulimieri, Arthur and I stood around two chests turned upside down on a packing blanket on the floor of his shop in Colchester, Conn.

“Look,” he said, “These two chests were made at the same time, about 1770-80, only 35 or 40 miles apart, and see how differently the feet were attached. One was made in Hartford and the other in Litchfield County.”

Hartford and Litchfield: A foot in each county
Craftsmen in these two counties came up with two different solutions (among others) to the same problem, Arthur went on to explain. The problem was how best to attach feet to the bottom of a dovetailed case. With the earlier joined case pieces, the stiles often continued downwards to form the legs, so the problem didn’t arise. But there are no stiles in dovetailed case pieces; four boards are dovetailed together to make the top, bottom and ends, the backboards are nailed on (very occasionally dovetailed) and the front is left open for doors or drawers. The bottom is the smooth side of a box; the feet have to be attached to it, they don’t extend from it. So the problem is to attach the feet so that they will bear the weight of the chest and withstand lateral pressure if it is slid along the floor.

On most case pieces there’s a decorative molding called the “base molding” that protrudes an inch or so from the base and finishes the case off in an aesthetically pleasing manner. In Litchfield County these moldings were applied to the front and sides and butted up to the feet. “But,” Arthur pointed out, “the moldings were decorative, not structural. They didn’t help strengthen the feet in any way, so the cabinetmakers devised a diagonal brace that they tenoned into the inside corner of each foot, and then they nailed the brace to the bottom board. This distributed the weight across the bottom board and braced the feet against lateral movement.

“In Hartford County,” Arthur continued, “only a hard day’s ride away, they came up with their own, different solution. Here the moldings that visually finish off the bottom of the chest are the edges of three wide boards nailed to the bottom of the case on the front and each side. We can see that these are already beginning to distribute the weight. And then each foot was made separately: the ogee brackets were dovetailed together at the angle and strengthened with quarter-round blocks. They were then secured by a rabbit joint to a quadrant-shaped, or sometimes a triangular, board that, in turn was nailed or screwed across two of the molded boards. They’re known now as ‘quadrant feet,’ and they’re a really effective way of making the ogee-bracket foot strong enough to stand up to centuries of use.”

“And there’s another thing,” Arthur said as his voice became even more engaging, “We occasionally find the same foot, approximately the same size, on all sorts of Hartford County furniture, no matter what its size. Sometimes the foot looks exactly right, but on some pieces it looks a little too small and on others a little too big – it all depends on the width of the piece it’s attached to.”

He paused and looked at me, “The evidence seems to suggest that there were specialist foot-makers who supplied the cabinetmakers with ready-made feet. Maybe they worked in different shops, or it’s possible that a cabinetmaker may have employed a specialist foot-maker in his own shop, we can’t tell. But it does seem that there was a specialization of labor going on there.”

Arthur grinned, “Henry Ford may like to think he invented mass production and the division of labor, but he was a century behind our cabinetmakers and Windsor chair makers!”

Iron country
As we stood around the two chests, Kevin gave me a broader perspective. “There’s recent research conducted at the Litchfield Historical Society,” he said, “that suggests that these methods were actually ways of saving wood.” My ears pricked up. As a dealer in English furniture, I am very familiar with the tricks that English joiners and cabinetmakers had to resort to in order to save wood. But this was the first time I’d heard of it in America; I’d always thought that colonial Americans believed that their supply of wood was pretty well infinite.

“Well, yes, they did,” said Kevin after I made the comment, “but locally, there was actually a wood shortage. Much of Litchfield County was known as ‘iron country’ and the iron foundries needed a lot of wood. Between the cabinetmakers and the foundries, not to mention the house builders, there was intense competition for the rapidly decreasing supply of good timber. Any method that saved wood, or that enabled otherwise waste wood to be used, offered significant cost savings in a situation like that.

“But there’s a side effect of the iron foundries,” Kevin continued, pointing to the cross brace on the Litchfield chest. “It meant that big, iron nails were plentiful and cheap, so we find them used liberally in local furniture like these chests: in other parts of Connecticut, wooden pegs were used instead, and in Hartford we often find screws.”

These braced feet of Litchfield and the quadrant feet of Hartford could utilize scrap wood that would otherwise have been thrown away, or off-cuts of pieces that had been prepared for another use. Arthur pointed to a piece with a molded edge that was supporting one foot, an obvious off-cut, and then showed that the other foot used different scraps in a different pattern. But both feet were making use of otherwise useless wood.

“It was all part of the booming economy after the Revolution,” Kevin explained. “The demand for furniture increased, and so did the demand for iron, and they both needed the same resource – trees!”

Yankee ingenuity
Where did these distinctive engineering solutions come from, I wondered? “We have to believe that it was local craftsmen thinking for themselves,” Arthur answered. He walked over to his library and pulled down a recently published book on Litchfield County furniture (See references). He pointed me to a passage on page 41 that read:
“A distinctive group of cases with histories in eastern Litchfield County emerged in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. This group combines ambitious stylistic features with experimental construction methods. […] These case pieces have decorative elements including claw-and-ball feet, quarter columns at the case corners, and, occasionally, ox-bow fronts.”

“There you have it,” he smiled, “’Experimental construction methods,’ That’s what these Connecticut craftsmen were renowned for; they figured things out for themselves. Different Litchfield makers used slightly different ways of bracing the feet diagonally, but they all followed basically the same principle and I don’t think we’ll ever know who had the idea first.”

He turned to the other chest. “And in Hartford County they figured things out differently. Again, we can’t tell who first came up with the idea of the quadrant foot, but it spread throughout the county. It’s as distinctive to Hartford County as the diagonal brace is to Litchfield County.”

As I listened to these two experts, I was infected by their passion for their subject, and I was reminded yet again how a seemingly small detail can tell a big story if only we know how to “listen” to it. Arthur and Kevin knew those early Connecticut woodworkers almost as well as they know their own friends today. It’s this sort of intimate connection with an antique that you can’t get from books, and you can’t get from museums. You can get it only from an expert dealer who is not only knowledgeable, but is truly passionate, about his or her material. However much the antiques business is changing, there’ll always be a demand for what we might call “dealer-knowledge,” because we need it, and we can’t find it anywhere except in the shop and the words of a great dealer.