the Essex County cupboard project

as it becomes a book

For some newer readers here, you might have seen me refer to the “Essex County cupboards” - this refers to a group of cupboards made in that Massachusetts county between the late 1670s-early 1690s. This post is a snippet about my involvement with them…

Between March 2021 and October 2023 I built these two cupboards, both based on one at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Folded into building them was writing a book about how I went about it. Megan Fitzpatrick from Lost Art Press just sent back her first whack at that book, so now I’m going over her comments, answering questions, chasing down missing illustrations and generally having at it.

My involvement with this particular “shop tradition” (in furniture history studies, a nice way of saying we don’t know who made these, but we know they all stem from one shop...) reaches back to about 1998 when Bob Trent and I started researching all the related examples we could find. Joined by Alan Miller, we published our article on just the cupboards in 2001’s edition of American Furniture. https://chipstone.org/article.php/554/American-Furniture-2001/First-Flowers-of-the-Wilderness:-Mannerist-Furniture-from-a-Northern-Essex-County,-Massachusetts,-Shop-

Earlier this week I had done a lecture/demo at North Bennett Street School in Boston for both the furniture/cabinetmaking students and the preservation carpentry students. Aiming at the latter group, I inserted several slides about this group of cupboards to show their relationship to 17th-century house construction. The cupboards share several features with buildings of the period - among them, “jetties”, overhanging sections that extend beyond the lower supporting sections. Here’s a jettied building from Stratford, England

jetties, Stratford, PF photo

And a jettied cupboard, Winterthur’s “P 1680 W” cupboard, what Jennie Alexander called the “lunar lander” when she examined it one time.

PW 1680 cupboard, Winterthur Museum photo

As far as these cupboards go, It’s a relatively simple example. Relative is the key word, it’s still insanely complex for 17th-century joinery. To show how much work goes into framing it, I sketched just the front section of the lower case.

PF sketch of front framing, lower case