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AN OUTLINE OF FURNITURE-MAKING IN THIS COUNTRY: SHOWING THE PLACE OF CRAFTSMAN FURNITURE IN THE EVOLUTION OF AN AMERICAN STYLE
T HIS book is meant to give a comprehensive idea of the elements that go to make up the typical Craftsman home. Therefore at least one chapter must be devoted to Craftsman furniture, for in the making of this we first gave form to the idea of home building and furnishing which we have endeavored to set forth. For this reason, and because the furniture has so far remained the clearest concrete expression of the Craftsman idea, we are here illustrating a few of the most characteristic pieces thatscope of their experience, for, after the first primitive days of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England and the earliest settlers in the South, the life of the Colonists was modeled closely upon that of the old country and this life naturally found expression in their dwellings and household belongings. Therefore the Colonial style was so close to the prevailing style of the eighteenth century that it may be regarded as practically the same thing.
After the end of the Colonial period, and during the swift expansion that followed the
ONE OF THE LARGEST AND MOST MASSIVE OF THE CRAFTSMAN SETTLES; MADE OF FUMED OAK; SOFT LEATHER SEAT.
serve to show all the essential qualities of the style.
In order that the reader may understand clearly the reasons which led to the making of Craftsman furniture, and its place in the evolution of a distinctively American style that bids fair eventually to govern the great majority of our dwellings and household belongings, we will first briefly review the history of furniture making in this country. With the older styles, such as the English and the Dutch Colonial, we have little to do. They were importations from older civilizations, as were the Colonists themselves, and they ex-pressed the life of the mother country rather than that of the new. When we first began to make furniture in this country, the cabinet-makers naturally followed their old traditions and made the kind of furniture which most appealed to them and which came within the
Revolution, there was inevitably a return to the primitive. Importations from the old world were no longer popular and while the houses of the wealthy were still furnished with the graceful spindle-legged mahogany pieces of earlier days, most of the people were forced to content themselves with much plainer and more substantial belongings. Little chair factories sprang up here and there, especially in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts, and these supplied the great demand for the plain wooden chairs that we now call kitchen chairs, and the cane-seated chairs which were usually reserved for use in the best room. As the demand increased with the increasing population, the alert and resourceful New Englander began to invent machinery which would increase his output. As a consequence, the business of chair making made rapid growth, but the primitive
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