my all-time favorite 17th-century joiners

Trent sent a note tonight about a joined chest with 2 drawers coming up for sale soon in New York. 

It’s an old favorite of mine, made in Braintree, Massachusetts between 1650-1700. Look:

braintree chest w drawers

Here’s the link to the auction - http://www.doylenewyork.com/asp/fullCatalogue.asp?salelot=12AM02+++313+&refno=++907166

 

In an article of agreement in connection with William Savell, Sr.’s 1669 will, the sons of William Savell, Sr. agree that the widow, Sarah (Mullins Gannett) Savell shall have “…her whole estate returned to her that she brought to Our ffather for her own use & to dispose of forever with a chest with drawers & a Cubbert…”  

the distinction here is “chest with drawers” – plural. Most of this group had a single drawer below the chest compartment. 

Back when I was doing the legwork research chasing these chests down, I saw two examples that had 2 drawers instead of the more typical single drawer. One of those is now in the Chipstone collection in Milwaukee, WI. This might be the other one, or now a third. I did see a piece of 20th-century homemade furniture that incorporated two drawers from one of these. That piece descended in the Hayward family from old Braintree. 

The article from years ago is:

Peter Follansbee and John Alexander, “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: the Savell Shop Tradition” in American Furniture, ed., Luke Beckerdite, (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996) pp. 81-104

You can look it up on Chipstone’s website, but often you don’t get all the pictures there - http://www.chipstone.org/framesetAFintro.html

Fun stuff. 

---

[i].) for the will and inventory for William Savell Sr. see Suffolk County Registry of Probate (SCRP) #501, Massachusetts State Archives, Boston. 

 

some detail shots of the 2-panel chest

I’ve been sorting photos here, filing a bunch of stuff into more coherent folders. Sometimes the oak, birds & kids are all mixed together. I ran into more shots of that 2-panel chest I showed the other day. (lots of other chests too. I keep forgetting them). Several folks wrote and commented on that chest, so here’s the rest of it. The scratched moldings on the framing here cast a funny shadow, making it look bowed. It’s just a factor of the varying depth of the scratched moldings…and the raking light.

 

end view

It’s pretty narrow from front to back, and I totally forgot that I carved the side upper rails as well.

 

interior

The inner faces of the rear section are the flat faces. I scratched a molding on the edges of the stiles and upper rail, and used a single pine panel for the rear.

 

till open

Here’s the till, open. Pine side & bottom, oak lid.

 

till closed

Now closed.

 

rear view

A view of the rear section shows the notch cut in the top end of the rear stiles. When the flat face of this stile is inside the chest, you often have to cut away the top of the stile for the lid to open. You can see the floor boards here too, nailed up to the higher rear rail.

 

small chests; new-ish and old

a small oak chest

Sometimes I forget them altogether. Found this photo today while looking thru some folders here; and I haven’t seen this chest in a couple of years. I assume it’s in a repro house at the museum, so I’ll go looking for it one of these days.

It’s based on some tw0-panel chests I saw from Devon about 5 years ago. I really like the idea of these and want to make one for my house. I’ve seen them done with horizontal panels like this, or sometimes with wide vertical panels set apart by the wide muntin. Overall width is in the vicinity of 36″ – so a good 10″ or so smaller than most joined chests I make; some are even wider, the Savell shop in Braintree Massachusetts made them about 52″ wide. 

 

 here’s a Devon one I saw in a National Trust house in Cornwall in 2004.  Its lid has been altered to hinge in the midst of it, rather than at the rear…

 

Devon chest in Cothele

 

and here is one more I did in 2009. These are mostly made from sawn oak, the panels are about 12″ wide or so.

 

I have shown the original this is based on in detail before, the flatsawn stock was really tough quality.

central muntin, joined oak chest, Devon

 

and one detail of my panel from the repro above:

flatsawn white oak carved panel

 

I’ve never seen a New England one with only two panels, Trent mentions one that got away…maybe it will show up someday.

For those hankering for details about chests, (or anything else) remember to search the blog. There’s 3 years’ worth of stuff here. For some ideas about dimensions, see http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2010/11/11/joined-chest-proportions/

 

one chest, and some stuff that’s yellow and some that’s not

new chest 2011

I’ve been slogging away at some stuff lately; but nothing Earth-shattering. So for right now, just a few photos of a joined chest I finally finished. It started as a demo for carving one of these panels, then I carved two more for a photo shoot for an article for Popular Woodworking…so once I had the 3 panels, I decided to build a chest to go around them. This one has taken ages, it’s been a “spare time” project. It’s once again derived from the Ipswich,Massachusetts and Devon,England material. I love that carving style. I even carved the end rails; but showed some restraint & left those panels plain.

another view

Here is the interior, showing the till, the pine rear panels & floor. Also, an oak lid. Glued up of three or four radially-split boards. A lot of work to make this lid versus a single-board pine top, but nothing beats the oak lids.

interior

My yard has been busy lately, so I got little done at home. Memorial Day featured things that are yellow. First is a juvenile orchard oriole.

juvenile orchard oriole

the yellow warblers were all over the place, singing their heads off.

 

yellow warbler

 

 

I heard either a car alarm, or a cuckoo off in the distance. Later, the bird showed up, a yell0w-billed cuckoo.  He wasn’t there long, didn’t sing in the yard, and all I got was this photo…

 

yellow-billed cuckoo

 we had some corn, from goodness-knows-where.

first corn

 

 

these yellow roses bloomed

 

yellow rose

 

I have heard common yellowthroats in the yard, but haven’t laid eyes on them yet…here’s a female from Marshfield.

 

common yellowthroat

 

 

There were also some things that are not yellow.

 

female baltimore oriole

Today the kids & I came downstairs and found this dinosaur in the yard. Have to go check the sandpile, to see if there’s eggs laid next to the dumptrucks.

snapping turtle

I thought for a minture that she was headed for the bird bath.

no bath

 

knocking them off one-by-one

I finally finished assembly of the walnut high chair, except for a footboard. Fitting the arms was a bit of trial & error; they have rectangular tenons where they enter the rear stiles, and a round mortise where the front stile fits. Because of the canted front stiles, this mortise was bored at an angle, and the mortises in the rear stiles are also angled. Some fun making this all work; but in the end I was reasonably satisfied. But no pictures of the process – it took long enough as it is.

final assembly

Then I carved an extra panel – to use for finish sampling. I applied linseed oil, turpentine and some beeswax. Being a child’s chair, the ability to wipe it clean is a concern. My kitchen table is carved, and has remnants of yogurt and oatmeal embedded in the carvings. I could clean them out if I had to, I guess – but where’s the time?

  

Next up is a joined chest that has lingered in the shop for a couple of years – I have been building it from odds & ends; many of the carvings were from public demos. Two were photographed for an article on carving that I did for Popular Woodworking sometime in the past few years.  Yesterday I started the assembly, in preparation for fitting the till. Here is the chest front, from the inside; with one side inserted, and the cuts for the till. Also you can see a carving-gone-bad, re-used as a muntin.

chest sub-assembly

I pinned the side frames to the front, and then test-fitted the rear section in place. This gives me a chance to scribe the till parts accurately. I’ll dig out some till stock next, cut & fit the till, and then finish pinning the chest. Afte that comes the floor, or bottom of the chest. but that’s getting ahead of things.

assembling the joined chest

 

joined chest proportions

While I am churning through a zillion images & ideas for my talk this weekend at Historic Deerfield, I have been trying to make a concise explanaiton of the way the Savell joiners in Braintree, Massachusetts laid out their chest components. These chests show a slight variation in the widths of the panels and muntins; essentialy to arrive at an overall width somewhere near 52″.

the heights of the parts do not vary enough to matter, usually the top rail is 4″ high, the panels are 13″, next rail is 3″ and so on…(most of these chests have drawers, two do not.)

I argue (or present, I guess) that the tree determines the width of the panels, and when faced with narrower panels, the joiners here made wider muntins, and vice-versa. Not unusual; except that the adjustments they made are so slight, that there has to be a reason behind it…

Here’s notes scribbled on two chest photos, followed by a chart outlining 12 chests. 10 out of 12 chests are within 13/16″ in their overall width.

dimensions for Savell chest front

dimensions for another Savell chest example

[in this version of the chart, I did not give the measurements of each muntin & each panel; variations usually around 1/16" result in the long rails' shoulder-to-shoulder dimension maybe not adding up from the numbers here. but it's close]

Chest	Stile	Panel	Muntin	Rail	overall
Aetna Ins	3 ¼”	8 ¾”	3 ½”	45 ½”	52”
Private coll 2008	3 ¼”	8 7/8”	3 3/8”	45 5/8”	52 3/16”
Private coll fig 1	3 3/8”	8 7/8”	3 3/8”	45 9/16”	52 5/16”
PF coll	3 3/8”	8 3/8”	3 ¾”	44 13/16”	51 9/16”
Gardner Museum Boston	3 5/16”	8 5/16”	3 15/16”	44 15/16”	51 9/16”
Wadsworth Atheneum	3 3/8”	8 ¾”	3 3/8”	45 1/16”	51 13/16”
MFA, Boston	3 5/16”	8 7/16”	3 ¾”	45 1/8”	51 ¾”
Fiske chest, private coll.	3”	8 9/16”	3 ¾”	45 ½”	51 ½”
Bracket chest, private coll.	3 ¼”	8 1/8”	3 ½”	42 7/8”	47 1/8”
Private coll, 2010	3 1/8”	8 ¾”	3 ½”	45 ½”	51 ¾”
Chipstone	3 ¼”	8 9/16”	3 3/16”		50 ¼”
Two drawers, private coll.	3 3/8”	8 5/16”	3 7/8”	44 7/8”	51 5/8”

 

This is in contrast to, say Thomas Dennis’ shop; where in just three chests that I include in the talk, there is a variation in overall width by 42 1/4″ to 46 3/4″  – in those three, panel widths vary from 8″ (picture here) to 10 1/8″.  the one with the 10″-plus panels has muntins only 4 1/4″ wide, so there are adjustments here too, but of a much more generous nature.

Thomas Dennis chest w drawer

This chest has an overall width = 44 3/4”  and its panels = 8” wide; muntins 6 ¼”.

What does it all mean? Who knows…and it’s not science, but it is fun to see how two different shops approach similar tasks…

 

joined chest floor boards & more

It doesn’t seem it lately, but I do still make furniture. Today I managed to shoot a couple of ordinary-quality pictures of the floor of a joined chest I have underway in the shop. This chest is a copy of the ones made in Braintree, Massachusetts c. 1640-1700 by William Savell and his sons John & William. Alexander & I wrote about these chests in our first article for American Furniture in 1996.  [see Peter Follansbee and John Alexander, “Seventeenth-Century Joinery from Braintree, Massachusetts: the Savell Shop Tradition” in American Furniture, ed., Luke Beckerdite, (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1996) pp. 81-104 online at http://www.chipstone.org/framesetAFintro.html ]

The floor is white pine, and it runs front-to-back. This time I have four boards. They are feathered/beveled to fit into grooves in the inisde of the front & side rails. At the rear, the floor boards sit on top of a lower rear rail. Ultimately they get nailed down to this rail.  [click the pictures to enlarge]

bottom boards, joined chest

 

The boards are fitted with a simple tongue & groove joint; and the board being driven in last here is tapered in its width, to spread the floor side-to-side…a nice touch. The joints consists of a standard groove plowed in one  edge, and the tongue is made by cutting a rabbet on the top face of the matching piece, and just bevelling the bottom to leave a tongue.

detail floor boards' joint

 

driving the wedge-shaped board

 

Here is the T&G on one of the surviving chests from the period, in this case on drawer bottoms. But the same joint is used on the floor boards. this time it’s not even really a bevel, the board is thin enough to make a “bare-faced” version of the tongue. These are riven white cedar boards, some are 10″ wide – that’s a big cedar tree (2′ or more) for southern New England.

tongue & groove boards, Savell chest

 

But otherwise, I’m gearing up for spoon-class next week at Country Workshops. I have been waiting for this for a whole year – Drew mentioned it to me last summer when I was there.. http://countryworkshops.org/sloyd.html

The other day while the kids were playing in the sand pile, I roughed out a birch ladle-sized spoon…such fun.  It’s the only woodworking I do at home here… but they made off with my workbench, so I have nowhere to set my stuff down. Now I have to make a new bench for the yard…

workbench absconded

hewing spoon

 

large birch spoon

 

Joined chest; cutting till parts

till detail, PF chest

The interior compartment inside a joined chest is called a till. These are commonly found, sometimes the till is gone, and the notches in the stiles and rails are all that remain.  I was cutting the notches for one recently, and I am often struck by how much of this oak you can cut away and still have a piece strong enough to stay together.

This next photo is the front stile for the chest I’m building now. This stile is red oak, and it’s about 3 1/4″ wide by 1 3/4″ thick. Clustered up near the top end of the stile are several cuts into the stock.

• First, the two mortises, for the front and side upper rails. These are 5/16″ wide by about 3 3/4″ high. The one for the front rail is about 1 1/2″ deep, the other about 1 1/4″ deep.

• Each has two 1/4″ holes bored in them, those for the front rail go all the way through the stile.

• There is a groove running along each edge, into these mortises, for the beveled panels.

• Additionally there is a notch cut across the inner face of the stile for the till bottom. this notch is about 3/8″ wide and about the same depth. It is positioned so that the till bottom is flush with the bottom edge of the upper rails.

• What is missing from this photo is one more assault on this piece of wood – the hole bored into the stile for the hinged end of the till lid. This hole is usually about 3/8″ in diameter and about 1/2″ deep, and right near what will be the top end of the stile, after the extra wood is trimmed off the top. It will be about 3/8″ away from the mortise for the side rail.

That’s a lot of cuts into this piece of wood, all in the same neighborhood. Sometimes I am amazed that the stile can take it.

mortises, till trench & pin holes

 

Here’s an original that didn’t make it. Here we’re looking at the inside of the upper front rail. The till side and top are missing, but the bottom is in place. This chest is a little different, in that it’s a joined front fixed to board sides and rear. So the busted stile here has only one mortise in it, but where the side mortise would be in a standard chest, a rabbet was cut instead, to receive the board side. Wooden pins were driven through the front stile into the edge of the board side. There’s no telling when this inner face of this mortise broke away. This chest saw some neglect; but it might very well have happened when the piece was being built. One of the great things about oak is how well it splits, but one of the troubles with oak is how well it splits.

inner front rail, smithsonian chest

Alexander shot these photos many years ago. We were quite excited to be able to see inside the mortise, and see that it doesn’t need to be any great shakes in there, just get the wood cut out so the tenon can fit in. Notice that the end of the tenon does not reach the bottom of the mortise. A critical point.

busted mortise, inside upper front rail

 

One time Alexander & I taught a class in joinery. A blacksmith student in the class gave us a phrase that has stayed with me:  “I don’t care how weak it is, as long as it’s strong enough.”

 

I always get this part wrong

There is an element used on some joined chests that I often get “wrong” and I’m down the road to doing it again. Some chests feature “brackets” – small decorative pieces fitted underneath the bottom front rail. (I’ve seen them called spandrels, but that’s not what they are. My copy of Harris’ Illustrated Dictionary of Historic Architecture is somewhere…but I can’t find it right now.  Alexander suggests keeping this book in the bathroom, but with the kids around now, some of the reading material there has changed…)

Here’s one of mine on our kitchen table. I made it flush with the rail and stile, which it sometimes is in period work, and I pinned its tenon – which most often is not the case. For some reason, these things are usually un-pinned. There is a nail driven up through the tip of the bracket into the bottom edge of the rail. I guess they just rely on that to keep it in place.

bracket, PF table

 

I have a chest I’m making for the museum that I want to put brackets on, and I already bored pin holes in the bracket mortises. I hadn’t double-checked my bracket notes – so that is what this blog post sort of serves as for the future. Many brackets are recessed from the face of the rail & stile. some are flush. Most are not pinned. all are nailed near the tip.  There are many used on the stuff from Ipswich, attributed to Thomas Dennis and his apprentices. Here is probably the best example, and note that it’s not pinned.

bracket, Thomas Dennis chest

 

Here’s another, not far from Dennis in space or time, but a different shape. But also flush, not pinned.

bracket, Capen chest of drawers, 1685

 

The project I am working on is a copy of a chest by John Savell. I have made these chests many times, but this time I decided to add the brackets. When Alexander & I (with Trent’s help)  studied this group of  chests back in the early 1990s, we only found one with brackets. Since our 1996 article, there have been three more chests found, and still no more brackets. And it’s a good thing, because the ones on this chest are pretty sorry examples.

joined chest, Jn Savell 1660-1687

Here is a detail shot by Alexander of one of the brackets. A little hard to see in this view, but it’s recessed back from the rail & stile. I think there was a knob near the tip of the profile that has split off.

bracekt, Savell chest

 

And here is another detail, same chest. No pin. recessed from face of stile & rail. barefaced tenon. Don’t know if there is a rear shoulder, but there certainly isn’t a front one. And the tenon is “stepped” i.e. there’s a cut at the bottom of the tenon – the mortise is not as high as the bracket is.  I have stepped bracket tenons, but in the opposite direction. I have made them fit mortises that are chopped just below the rail – with a chunk of wood left in the stile between the bottom of the rail mortise and the top of the bracket mortise. BUT I was making it up as I went along. I really haven’t looked at period brackets in enough detail.

detail recessed bracket

 

The carved design on the Savell brackets really left us feeling pretty disappointed. At the time we used to say that the Savells couldn’t do anything different from their standard joined chest. But the desk box we had in the article used a side panel that is carved in a successful design, using stock motifs from the group. But all its edges are straight…

desk box, William Savell, 1675-1700

 

Enough. I have one more, then it’s quits. I found a Thomas Dennis bracket with pins. So I’m not totally off the mark, just mostly off…

chest bracket, Thomas Dennis, 1676

 

plow plane, up one side & down the other

proper right stile, top view

 

A small detail that often perplexes people is the grooves plowed in chest’s stiles for the bevelled panels. In this view of a joined chest from Dedham, Mass. the groove for the side panel runs out the top end of the stile .  (it’s clogged with some kind of filler, after the fact) The groove for the front panel does not come out the top.

Now the other front stile:

proper left stile, top view

 

Here the groove for the front panel runs out the top, (again patched). The other groove is stopped before it gets out the top. This is as it should be. Here’s another chest, from Essex County, Mass. – same scenario.

proper right stile, top view

 

proper left stile, top view

 

The plow plane’s “handedness” is the reason behind these grooves being found in this pattern. I started a joined chest last week, and got a couple of shots that aim at showing how this happens. The plane goes up one side of the stile, and down the other. To get the groove deep enough just above the lower mortise on any side; you need to extend the groove beyond that mortise. Here’s two front stiles, laying on their faces.

grooves for side panels in chest stiles

 

Here is a full view of the stiles. To get the groove deep enough (about 1/2″) just above the lower mortise on the left-hand stile, I had to bring the plow plane back & extend the groove below this mortise. Because the plow only cuts in one direction (like a molding plane) the other stile’s groove was cut from top to bottom. Thus here, I had to get the groove beyond the top of the top mortise, to hit my 1/2″ depth just below that mortise. Thus the grooves run up one side, down the other. Almost always.

up one side, down the other

 

Here is the plane, (a poor shot, but the best I could get quickly) – the gist of it is to get the rear “skate” of the plow low enough to engage the iron in the mortise. If the groove did not extend back there, the skate would be tilted, and the iron wouldn’t be able to cut the groove deep enough right above the mortise.

plow plane cutting grooves

 

The plow in use:

plowing panel grooves

 

The chest thus far:

joined chest front, April 2010

 

Here’s some other posts I did concerning plow planes, if you didn’t see them:

http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/plow-planes-moxon-felebien-et-al/

http://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2009/05/07/new-old-plow-plane/