CHAPTER I
CHESTS, CHESTS OF DRAWERS, AND DRESSING-TABLES
THE chest was a most important piece of furniture in households of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It served as table, seat, or trunk, besides its accepted purpose to hold valuables of various kinds.
Chests are mentioned in the earliest colonial inventories. Ship chests, board chests, joined chests, wainscot chests with drawers, and carved chests are some of the entries; but the larger portion are inventoried simply as chests.
All woodwork—chests, stools, or tables—which was framed together, chiefly with mortise and tenon, was called joined, and joined chests and wainscot chests were probably terms applied to panelled chests to distinguish them from those of plain boards, which were common in every household, and which were brought to this country on the ships with the colonists, holding their scanty possessions.
The oldest carved chests were made without drawers beneath, and were carved in low relief in designs which appear upon other pieces of oak furniture of the same period.
Illus. 1.—Oak Chest, about 1650.
Illustration [1] shows a chest now in Memorial Hall, at Deerfield, which was taken from the house where the Indians made their famous attack in 1704. The top of the chest is missing, and the feet, which were continuations of the stiles, are worn away or sawed off. The design and execution of the carving are unusually fine, combining several different patterns, all of an early date. Chests were carved in the arch design with three or four panels, but seldom as elaborately as this, which was probably made before 1650.