The Fruits of Oligar

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ZEA, PHILIP MARTIN

THE FRUITS OF OLIGARCHY: PATRONAGE AND JOINERY IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS, 1630-1730

University of Delaware (Winterthur Program) M.A. 1984

University Microfilms

International 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106

ZEA, PHILIP MARTIN

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PHILIP MARTIN ZEA

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the University of Delaware in partial fulfillment of. the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Early American Culture

June, 1984

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE FRUITS OF OLIGARCHY: PATRONAGE AND JOINERY IN WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS, 1630-1730

PHILIP MARTIN ZEA

Approved %Sfa>t ^/iu> ------Robert Blair St. George, Ph.D. Professor in charge of thesis on behalf of the Advisory Committee

Approved O r U ______Stephanie G. Wolf7Ph\D^ Coordinator, Winterthur Program in Early American Culture

Approved R.B. Murray, Ph.D. • University Coordinator for Graduate Studies

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. IN MEMORY OF

MY MATERNAL GRANDPARENTS

DR. EDMUND OTIS HOVEY AND DELL ROGERS HOVEY

WHOSE CAREERS IN MUSEUM WORK

SHAPED MY EDUCATION

iii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

My Winterthur thesis was begun in 1979 under the tutelage of Benno Forman. His death in 1982 marked the loss of a demanding teacher whose insistence on excellence and on seeing, rather than looking, shaped the perception of interested students for over a decade. I am grateful for his advice on the initial draft of my thesis. Hopefully, a trace of his sense of history and connoisseurship is perceptible in the following pages. Selfishly, I regret the loss of his comments on the final draft of my work.

The completion of my writing is due to the encouragement and commentary of Stephanie Wolf, Coordinator of the Winterthur Program, and of Robert Blair St. George, Teaching Associate, who offered to advise my work after his appointment at the Winterthur Museum. His criticism has been valuable.

Several people assisted me during the research and preparation of my thesis; in fact, there are more contributors than there are "Hadley" chests to ponder. I cannot acknowledge everyone individually within the context of the current presentation. However, I would like to recognize the encouragement of Donald R. Friary and my colleagues at Historic Deerfield and the help of staff members at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial- Association in Deerfield, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House in Hadley, the Hadley Historical Society, the Hatfield Historical Society, and the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum in Springfield.

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Page

APPROVAL PAGE...... ii DEDICATION...... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENT...... iv LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS...... vi LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS...... viii ABSTRACT...... ix

CHAPTER I DEFINING THE CULTURE OF RURAL NEW ENGLAND 1 II "AN ERRAND TO THE WILDERNESS"...... 6 III THE COVENANTS WITH LEADERSHIP AND FAMILY 24 IV LEADERSHIP, FAMILY, AND DESIGN...... 48 V THE JOINERY...... 62 VI A CATALOGUE OF HAMPSHIRE COUNTY JOINERY...... 78 VII BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 141

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page 1. Map of Present-day Western Massachusetts...... 8 2. Dudley Woodbridge, Sketch of Deerfield, 1728...... 19 3. Box, Springfield Area, circa 1700...... 51 4. • Joined. Chest with Two Drawers, "N^M/1700", Springfield Area...... 52 5. Joined Chest with Drawer, "WA", Northern Hampshire County, circa 1700...... 64 6. Underside of Joined Chest with Drawer, "WA", Northern Hampshire County, circa 1700 ...... 65 7. Back of Joined Chest with Drawer, "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa .1700 ...... 66 8. Detail of Bottom Boards of Joined Chest with Drawer, "AA", Probably Hatfield Area, 1685-1710... 67 9. Drawers of Joined Chest with Three Drawers, "SH", Northern Hampshire County, 1700-1720...... 68 10. Drawer Support of Joined Chest with Drawer, "WA", Northern Hampshire County, circa 1700 ...... 69 11. Two Panels of Chest with Drawer, "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700 ...... 70 12. Side of Chest with Drawer, "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700 ...... 71 13. Interior of Side Panel of Chest with Drawer, "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700 ...... 72 14. Detail of Right Post of Chest with Drawer, "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700 ...... 73 15. Joined Chest with Drawer, "PK/1699, Springfield Area...... 81

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Page 16. Joined Chest with Two Drawers, "AA" , Probably Hatfield Area, 1685-1710 .. . 87 17. Joined Chest with Two Drawers, "MS", Probably Hadley Area, 1710-1725...... 91 18. Joined Chest with Drawer, "PW", Possibly Springfield Area, circa 1700 ...... 94 19. Joined Chest with Drawer, "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700...... 98 20. Joined Chest with Two Drawers, "HH", Hampshire County, 1700-1720...... 101 21. Joined Chest with Two Drawers (no initials), Hadley-Hatfield Area, 1700-1720...... 104 22. Leg of Joined Table, Hadley-Hatfield Area, 1700- 1720...... 107 23. Joined Chest with Drawer, "ESTHER LYMAN", Northampton Area, 1700-1720...... 108 24. Joined Chest with Two Drawers, "ISM", Hadley Area, 1700-1720...... 112 25. Joined Chest with Two Drawers, "LB", Hadley Area, 1700-1720...... 116 26. Joined Chest with Two Drawers (no initials), Hampshire County, 1710-1730...... 120 27. Joined Cupboard with Drawers, "HANNAH BARNARD", Hadley Area, circa 1715...... 124 28. Joined Chest of Drawers, Hampshire County, 1710- 1720...... 128 29. Joined Chest of Drawers, Hampshire County, 1720- 1730...... 131 30. Joined Chest with Two Drawers, Deerfield Area, 1715-1730...... 134 31. Board Chest with Two Drawers, "KK", Northampton Area, circa 1720...... 138

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS

P a g e

Table 1. Average Appraisals of Hampshire County Probate Inventories, 1700-1702 and 1714- 1716...... 14

Table 2. Average Appraisals of Property in Estates Valued under 4 100, Hampshire County Probate Inventories, 1700-1702 and 1714-1716...... 14

Table 3. Average Appraisals of Property in Estates Valued above 4 100, Hampshire County Probate Inventories, 1700-1702 and 1714-1716...... 16

Table 4. The Probate Inventory of John Marsh, Hadley, 1725...... 16

Chart 1. Annual Income from Masonry, Samuel Billings, Hatfield, 1685-1704 ...... 39

Chart 2. Annual Construction of Chimneys, Samuel Billings, Hatfield, 1685-1704...... 40

Chart 3. Sources of Income, Samuel Billings, Hatfield, 1691-1693...... 41

Chart 4. Annual Construction of Chimneys, Nathaniel Phelps, Northampton, 1727-1747...... 42

viii

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT

The Pynchon oligarchy and the family networks of leaders and tradesmen affected cultural choice in Hampshire County. The Pynchons1 early arrival at Springfield and their shrewd investments funded the settlement of western Massachusetts. The Presbyterianism of Solomon Stoddard of Northampton further defined the region as a separate entity by the 1680s. Deference and dependence assured the Pynchons' brokerage of patronage. Their subsidy of construction meant steady work for selected joiners whose labor was accelerated by the cycle of warfare and rebuilding. The Pynchons1 approval of workmanship and the preferences of patronized families of joiners homogenized the appearance of the built environment.

The Pynchons1 power structure and its impact on joinery sixty years after settlement are understood through the study of six ledgers kept by John Pynchon. An analysis of probate inventories before and after the sacking of Deerfield in 1704 illustrates the relationship between the political climate and settlement patterns. Case studies of two masons provide insight into the working cycles of builders. Other ledgers, diaries, town records, published histories, and genealogies document the economy of superimposed family ties at the foundation of society before 1730. Finally, the study of scores of joined chests and related furniture identifies the techniques of parallel shop traditions. The physical evidence of the furniture and the careers of joiners reflect the patterns of patronage exercised by the Pynchons in Hampshire County.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. I DEFINING THE CULTURE OF RURAL NEW ENGLAND

In 1961 Edmund S. Morgan wrote that

If we were to study the history of early New England by localities, town by town and church by church, I believe we could discover a great deal not only about the diversity of Puritanism but also about its range and penetration within society.... Such a study would require a thorough examination of...the records of town meetings, proprietors' meetings, and tax lists, records of birth, marriages, and death, of baptisms, admissions to communion, and church discipline.

Professor Morgan's plan for laying open the fabric of seventeenth-century New England was prophetic. His suggestion that a sequence of towns required examination because each colonial community seemed different has been pursued by historians for a generation. "Community studies" have proven that the environment and the English traditions of early settlers varied dramatically from town to town and that Puritanism was as diverse as the local ministers whose 2 personal beliefs always reduced orthodoxy to sectarianism. Historians have demonstrated that, with time and prosperity, fewer families in New England were convinced of the inherent rightness of the Puritan church-state which ordered their 3 spiritual and secular lives. Economic growth and warfare were better managed by other institutions in each community. Traditional English law and town meetings, agricultural practices and working cycles, family customs and allegiances, and the adversities of politics and nature also channelled the behavior of people and transformed New England society.

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Edward M. Cook, Jr., culminated Morgan's line of inquiry with a book entitled The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England. He refutes the existence of the New England town by quantifying variations in patterns of leadership, land holdings, and church membership in several 4 communities. The investigation of public records, however, provides only the framework of society, not its battered contents of attitudes and work processes that comprise the cultural core of human existence and its history. The impact of society upon people and the definitions of different types of communities are hidden in private records, personal belongings, and demography.

Society is shaped by the collective traditions of its citizens, political commitment, religious belief, economic dependence, and the natural environment. If these influences are well articulated and closely aligned, the resulting homogeneity within local institutions solidifies perceptions of normative behavior and creates confidence. An efficient communal system can evolve for putting bread on everyone's table and thanks in everyone's heart. Community leaders in New England called upon religion, town meetings, and family to maintain society and to institutionalize the beliefs that assured consistency. With order and repetition, the visual components of 5 culture acquire the same complexion. The factors that shape society form a tunnel through which travel everyone and everything. Field systems, buildings, furnishings, gravestones, and technology become consistent within specific date ranges. Imported objects also assume an air of similarity because they fall within a cultural norm of acceptable taste. The man-made components of our environment are defined in part by the originality and

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"modernity" of design, the sources of the materials used, and the training, construction techniques, and shop practices of their makers. Social historians must remember that the depth of the cultural imprint on objects is more important than their artfulness. The subjective measuring of quality can skew the validity of cultural analysis.

Defining the complexity of a regional culture works on a sliding scale. Analyses of population density, class structure, geography, working cycles, systems of economic exchange, and even soil types all contribute to describing cultural identity. Many studies of rural society have assumed a derivative stance: the cultural raison-d1etre of an agricultural region is wholly aligned with a nearby city from which cultural influences are beamed by commercial dominance. Although wealth and numbers have been present in trade centers like Boston since the days of settlement, the cultural preferences of city dwellers came to the countryside in packages labeled "take it" or "leave it" before improved transportation and communication influenced purchasing patterns in the twentieth century. Before the days of mail order catalogues, many agricultural communities, like those in western Massachusetts, were led by their own trend-setters, who developed a distinctive amalgam of cultural attitudes g shaped by both urban and local influences.

The task here is an interdisciplinary analysis of the culture of the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts before 1730. The goal is to create a three-dimensional image of a second-generation society shaped by a matrix of Mannerist and Renaissance traditions in seventeenth-century *7 New England. The following discussions of environmental pressures, social institutions, material culture, and

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design illustrate the preferences of an inland, farming society and explain the high degree of cultural autonomy sustained by agricultural prosperity in the Connecticut Valley.

NOTES:

1. Edmund S. Morgan, "New England Puritanism: Another Approach," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 18, no. 2 (April 1961): 236. 2. A sampling of important studies of New.England communities includes: Charles Grant, Democracy in the Connecticut Frontier Town of Kent (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1963); Darrett B. Rutman, Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965); John Demos, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); Philip Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970); Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1970); Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Alfred.A. Knopf, 1970); Dirk Hoerder, Society and Government, 1760-1780: The Power Structures of Massachusetts Townships (Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany: John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universitat, 1972); Richard P. Gildrie, Salem, Massachusetts, 1626-1683: A Covenant Community (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975); Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); Bruce C. Daniels, The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 16 35-1790 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1979); Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983). 3. Richard L. Bushman, From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 267- 268.

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4.- Edward M. Cook, Jr., The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). 5. Henry Glassie, "Folk Art," Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1972), pp. 253- 280 . 6. Robert F. Trent, Hearts & Crowns: Folk Chairs Of the Connecticut Coast, 1720-1840 (New Haven: The New Haven Colony Historical Society,.1977); Edward S. Cooke, Jr., Fiddlebacks and Crooked Backs: Elijah Booth and Other Joiners in Newtown and Woodbury, 1750-1820 (Waterbury, Connecticut: The Mattatuck Historical Society, 1982). 7. Robert F. Trent, "The Concept of Mannerism," New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 3:368-379.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. II "AN ERRAND TO THE WILDERNESS"

During the seventeenth century, the crisis of survival postponed the promise of prosperity in western Massachusetts. The north-south axis of the fertile Connecticut River Valley, the distance to Boston, and periodic warfare created a regional identity in the towns of Springfield, Westfield, Enfield, Suffield, Northampton, Hadley, Hatfield, Deerfield, and Northfield (fig. 1). That identity was orchestrated by a handful of leaders who invested heavily in the settlement of the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts.'*'

Despite the military struggle with England's foes in Canada, the history of prosperity in western Massachusetts began in 1636 when William Pynchon established a feudal town at Springfield, named for his native village near Chelmsford in Essex. Blemished only by the wheat blast and droughts of the 1660s and by King Philip's War in the 16 70s, the success of the Pynchon family funded the settlement of second-generation towns in the region. Robert Child wrote to Samuel Hartlib at Boston in 1645 that the towns in the Connecticut Valley

[are] exceedingly abounding in corne. ... [It is] the fruitfulest [of] places in all New England....Last year [they] spared 20,000 bushels of corne and have already this year sent to the [Massachusetts] Bay 4000 bu[shels] at least.^

Travelers overland from Boston to the seat of the Pynchon family at Springfield faced an arduous journey of one hundred miles that took three days to complete. The

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Fig. 1. Map of Present-day Western Massachusetts. Detail of "An Outline of New England," National Cartographical Society, 1966. Franklin County (1811) and Hampden County (1812) were formed from old Hampshire County. Enfield and Suffield, now in Connecticut, were part of Hampshire County until 174 9. The large towns, founded in the seventeenth century, are underlined. Their territories were greatly subdivided after the Indian Wars to form the familiar towns of today.

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trip required nightly stops at Marlborough and Brookfield. Edward Taylor recorded his journey to take the pastorate at Westfield in 1671.

From [Marlborough] we went out...about half an hour before sunrising, for Quabaug [Brookfield]...but about 10 of clock we lost our way in the snow and woods, which hindered us some 3 or 4 miles; but finding it again by the markt trees, on we went, but our talking was of lying in the Woods all night, for we were then about 30 miles off from our Lodgen, having neither house nor Wigwam in our way. But about 8 at night we came in, through mercy, in health to our Lodgen, from which on the next day we set out for Springfield, which we arrived at also in health, and on the next day we ventured to lead our Horses, in great danger over Connecticut River [to Westfield], though altogether against my will, upon the ice, which was about 2 dayes in freezing; but mercy going along with, though the ice cracked every step, yet we came over s a f e l y . 3

Taylor found a limited prosperity at Springfield. Unlike most New England towns, the freehold ownership of land did not provide the economic base of the community. Instead, the Pynchon family ran a company town. A kind of corporation had been conceived at the time of settlement by William Pynchon, a former treasurer of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, his son-in-law Henry Smith, and John Burr, "carpenter".4 Settling north of Windsor and Hartford, Pynchon mastered the native dialect within months and 5 gained the trust and trade of the Indians. He controlled the market for furs, grain, and lumber above the falls at Enfield for decades.6 By 1639 Pynchon's payment of 51% of 7 Springfield's tax bill reflected his wealth and power.

Springfield's proximity to the Connecticut Colony • and the grain shortages incurred during the Pequot War of 16 37 allowed Pynchon to consolidate his holdings at the

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risk of controversy. He tried to fix the price of grain. Responding to rising costs, the General Court of Connecticut fined Pynchon 1 40 in corn for hoarding produce. "Is not this a plaine turning mee out of the saddle to take O the Markett out of my handes?" he wrote. In the spring of 1638, the Massachusetts Bay Colony reaffirmed its claim to the western lands. Springfield fell within the boundary, and Pynchon seized the legal windfall to withdraw his tax 9 and military support from the other valley towns.

The turn of events laid the foundation for Pynchon's fiefdom and for the cultural autonomy of western Massachusetts. Springfield became one focal point of a triangle with Boston and Hartford at the other vertices. Pynchon's Hampshire County became a virtual colony of the Massachusetts Bay with him as its governor and minister of the interior. Later during the 1640s, Pynchon exercised even greater freedom when the English Civil Wars erased the Crown's supervision of New England. By 16 50 Pynchon's fur trade with the Indians had become so extensive that the Dutch in the Hudson Valley complained that

Mr Pinchon using trade and Comerce with the Native americans hath soe fare advanced upon trade...that the trade and Comerce in these paartes...is much damnified and undervallued not onely to the Inriching the said Native barbarians but the overthrow of the trade.

William's son, John, ran the family corporation after the elder Pynchon returned to England in 1652. By the end of the century, over one-third of the resident adult males rented some portion of their land, livestock, or buildings from the Pynchons at any one time. Almost all of Springfield's heads of household (92.2%) rented at some time from the Pynchons, who owned about two thousand acres of the town's best land as well as the mills and

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Springfield's only store. In 1685, the next largest landowner, Japhet Chapin, held 365 acres. Between 1655 and 1702, forty townspeople lost nearly a thousand acres, plus livestock and buildings, valued at 4 1134 to foreclosures exercised by John Pynchon, who owned more land than the collective holdings of the bottom two-fifths (43%) of freeholders in Springfield. As the chief magistrate of Hampshire County, Pynchon also controlled local political sentiment and its voice m Boston. 11

The private interests of the Pynchons subsidized the settlement of second-generation towns around Springfield and artificially stabilised the economic development of the region. Between 16 53 and 1662, John Pynchon bought the land of Nonotuck north of the Holyoke Range from some thirty-nine sachems as the agent of the General Court and as the representative of the Deerfield proprietors at Dedham. 12 Pynchon met the need of the first-generation towns to expand. During the Great 13 Migration, about 20,000 people left Old England for New. Although the growth rate lapsed during the Civil War, good land was needed to absorb the excess populations of coastal towns. Simultaneously, Boston divines, like John Cotton and Increase Mather, were failing to save the idealized Puritan church-state from dissenting immigrants. No tenet of reformed Protestantism could organize . . 14 shiploads of diverse refugees into covenanted communities. Both physical and philosophical space was needed. Families required adequate land to subsist in an agricultural economy and time to gain financial security, to formulate their thoughts about religion in the New World, and to find neighbors with similar goals.

The second-generation towns of western Massachusetts were settled by small groups of like-minded

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neighbors and by ne'er-do-wells only able to invest in undeveloped towns along the frontier. The first type of settler characterized the party of sixty dissenters from Wethersfield, Connecticut, who founded Hadley in 1659. Like the elder Pynchon, they were Englishmen redefining an English society. Established in 1636, Wethersfield had been settled by people from Watertown at the Massachusetts Bay. As Wethersfield grew, the demand for fertile land outstripped its availability. A great strain was placed on local institutions like the church, with its limited membership of "visible saints," to unify the large town. Resentment among non-members, who were expected to attend service and to pay taxes for the maintenance of the minister, erupted when Reverend John Russell accused one John Hollister of slander in 1656. An outraged Hollister turned to the town’s non-church members for support and was elected to the General Court. Most of the church members sided with John Russell, dividing the community. When a petition was circulated to hire a new minister in 1658, the Russell group prepared to move up the Connecticut Valley. All but eight church members and their displaced minister were joined by other dissidents and agreed to 15 settle at Hadley. Their request for a grant near Northampton was accepted by the Massachusetts General Court and was implemented by the ubiquitous John Pynchon. True to their Protestant background, these self-exiled pillars of the Wethersfield congregation found order in their dissent. They signed a covenant at Hartford on April 18, 1659, creating a joint stock company before God.^ Such homogeneous groups infused stability in their second-generation towns because a high percentage of them were already church members. As Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich at the Bay asserted in The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam, "True religion is a testing fire which doth congregate

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17 homogeneity and segregate heterogeneity."

That heterogeneity, however, was only segregated— not removed. Other than perhaps Northampton, the second-generation towns north of Springfield were exposed frontier settlements; their citizens feared murderous Indian attacks for decades and lived in considerable poverty because improvements were foolhardy and because the well-to-do normally lived in safer places. Deerfield was destroyed in 1675 and 1704; raiding parties approached the town several other times. Northfield was abandoned for most of its first forty years of existence. Life in these towns was insular and orderly, more for the sake of survival than for the realization of the Puritan church-s ta te.

The early settlers of these towns, by and large, had not been pillars of society in their former residences. Despite the claims of later antiquarians and genealogists, they were ne'er-do-wells, garrison soldiers, camp followers, and younger sons lacking paternal support. After initial settlement, these towns grew slowly in population. The same men consistently held local office and participated in town meetings. Most competent citizens participated in local government, but little attention was paid to affairs in distant Boston. Representatives were rarely sent to the 18 General Court because of the expense. Instead, the Pynchon family provided the economic base, legal structure, and social order in the buffer towns between Springfield and Quebec = ^

The case of Philip Mattoon typifies the second kind of settler and the Pynchons' influence on the economy of the valley where they owned land in every town and where most settlers were indebted to them. Mattoon came to western Massachusetts as a soldier during King Philip's

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War. In 1677, an indebted Mattoon contracted with John Pynchon to rent twenty-two acres of land in Deerfield, which was abandoned, for eleven years at an annual rate of up to 4 4. He also agreed to pay the taxes, to maintain the fences, and to build

a good dwelling house, strong, substantial ... & compleatly finished, 30 ft long, 20 ft wide & 10 ft stud. Also a barn at least 48 ft long, 24 ft wide & 14 ft stud, well braced...& to compleat & finish same before the end of the term, & then to leave & deliver up all in good r e p a i r . 20

Mattoon's total rent amounted to 4 20.10.0, plus taxes and the cost of constructing the buildings. When he fulfilled the contract in 1688, Mattoon had only the crops and livestock raised on the land— no doubt already consumed or sold to John Pynchon— to show as equity. Meanwhile, Pynchon had been able to entice Mattoon, a chronic troublemaker, away from Springfield with the promise of a fresh start in dangerous territory that the magistrate wished to have improved.

Despite continued improvements to the land by both types of settlers, the threat of attack curbed the investment value of property north of Springfield until the 1720s. A comparison of the estates of men who died in Hampshire County during the years 1700-1702 and 1714-1716 shows that the average value of their property was virtually identical despite normal inflation: 4 169.13.3 21 and 4 169.5.2 respectively. Between those sample years, Deerfield was razed in 1704, and the line of settlement 22 again fell back to Hadley and Hatfield. A breakdown of these estates suggests that the great potential of the soil had been discovered, but that the threat of warfare kept many families from developing a domestic life north of Springfield (table 1). Analysis shows, for example, that

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TABLE 1. Average Appraisals of Hampshire County Probate Inventories, 1700-1702 and 1714-1716, Hampshire County Registry of Probate, Northampton, MA.

1700-1702 1714-1716

1 . s . d. (%) 4 . s . d . (%) % Change Real Estate 99.10. 9 58.7 122. 4. 7 72.2 18.6 Livestock 26. 2. 2 15.4 11. 5. 6 6.6 -56.9 Tools 6.11. 8 3.9 7. 0. 2 4.1 5.7 Produce 6.18. 6 4.0 8. 9. 2 5.0 18.3 Furnishings 30.10. 2 18.0 20. 5. 9 12 .0 -33.5 TOTAL 169.13. 3 100.0 169. 5. 2 100.0 - .2

1. Furnishings include furniture, silver, clothing 9 textiles, and books

TABLE 2. Average Appraisals of Property in Estates Valued under 1 100, Hampshire County Probate Inventories, 1700-1702 and 1714-1716, Hampshire County Registry of Probate, Northampton, MA.

1700-1702 1714-1716

4. s . d. (%) 4. s. d. (%) % Change Real Estate 25. 1. 5 47.6 26. 0. 0 49.0 3.7 Livestock 9. 9. 1 17.9 5. 5. 2 9.9 -44.5 Tools 3. 5. 9 6.3 2.18.10 5.5 -10.6 Produce 1.12. 2 3.0 6. 5. 0 11.8 74.4 Furnishings 13. 4. 5 25.1 12.12. 8 23.8 - 4.2 TOTAL 52.12.10 99.9 53. 1. 8 100.0 - .9

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the percentage of real estate value in a man's total property appraisal rose nearly one-fifth (18.6%) between 1700-1702 and 1714-1716. Simultaneously, the average appraisal of farm produce increased at the same rate (18.3%), and the average value of farm tools rose about six 23 percent (5.7%). However, the political instability of the region caused the average appraisals of household goods and livestock, which require daily maintenance, to decrease sharply (-3 3.5% and -56.9% respectively).

A change occurred in the wealth of men who died in Hampshire County between 1700-1702 and 1714-1716. Many settlers left the Hampshire County frontier because they feared attack and because the value of livestock was depressed. Speculators in turn purchased their property. In 1700-1702 and 1714-1716 real estate comprised nearly half (47.6% and 49% respectively) of the value of estates worth less than 1 100 (table 2). Furthermore, these estates were appraised at an average value of 1 52.12.10 and 4 53.1.8 despite the passage of fifteen years. Among those estates that were appraised at over 4 10 0 during 1700-1702 and 1714-1716, the value of land rose thirteen percent (60.6% to 73.5%) of the evaluation of the average estate (table 3). The real estate values in these probate inventories rose from an average of 4 166.11.2 to 4 174.14.4. However, the value of household items stagnated in those estates valued above 4 100. The appraisals of livestock fell by half in all estates (from 17.9% to 9.9% of the total value of estates under 4 100 and from 14.9% to 6.1% of estates over 4 100). Among the prosperous, finer household furnishings were apparently either sacrificed for the necessities of life, reinvested in land, or more likely taken by their owners to Connecticut and safety. Those poorer farmers who stayed behind evidently turned their energies away from livestock

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TABLE 3. Average Appraisals of Property in Estates Valued above 1 100, Hampshire County Probate Inventories, 1700-1702 and 1714-1716, Hampshire County Registry of Probate, Northampton, MA.

1700-1702 1714-1716

1. s. d. (%) 1. s. d. (%) % Change Real Estate 166.11. 2 60 .6 174.14. 4 73.5 4.7 Livestock 41. 1.11 14.9 14.11.11 6.1 -44 .1 Tools 9.11. 0 3.5 14. 4. 6 6.0 32.8 Produce 11.14. 1 4.2 9.13. 2 4.1 -17.5 Furnishings 46. 1. 2 16.7 24. 9. 2 10.3 -46.9 TOTAL 274.19. 3 99.9 237.13. 1 100.0 -13.6

TABLE 4. The Probate Inventory of John Marsh, Hadley, 1725, Hampshire County Registry of Probate, Northampton, MA.

1. s. d. (%) Real Estate 752. 0. 0 60.2 Livestock 148. 6. 0 11.9 Tools 19. 5.11 1.5 Produce 56. 4. 2 4.5 Furnishings 273. 6.10 21.8 1. s. d. (%) (Furniture 96. 7. 7 7.,7) (Silver 60. 5. 0 4,.8) (Apparel 16. 8. 0 1,.3) (Textiles 96. 2.,10 7,.7) (Books 4. 3., 5 .3) TOTAL ( 273. 6.,10 21 .8) 1249. 2.11 99.9

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and toward produce, which is labor intensive during only a short period in the summer months. Clearly, the investment value of land was rising among speculators and. some wealthy farmers while the general population apparently dropped and overall agricultural production declined.

The probate inventory of a well-to-do farmer in Hadley, John Marsh, shows that the quality of life was on 24 the upswing by 1725 (table 4). The value of his holdings reflects the growing security of a prosperous family in Hampshire County and the long-awaited realization of investments begun by the Pynchon family nearly a century before. His land comprised a lower percentage of the value of his total estate than the corresponding figure for estates above 4 100 in 1714-1716, and the value of his household furnishings was greater than the 1714-1716 average. Livestock played a larger role in his farming operation than the previous norm. Marsh owned six driving horses, a colt, six oxen, six steers, four milch cows, four heifers, and six swine. They were appraised at 4 148.6.0, the total value of many estates. By 1725, beef cattle production was becoming an important part of the economy of 25 the Connecticut Valley.

Three years after Marsh's death in 1725, Dudley Woodbridge kept a diary of his trip to western Massachusetts. He described riding

into Hadly town, about 4 o'clock, where we were kindly entertained....'Tis a very pleasant, delightful town, seated on a very even plain....the buildings very regular on each side the street....About half a mile from the meeting-house we came to Hadly ferry, and crossed the famous Connecticut River, and came into Hatfield,— which is also a pleasant town; about a mile and a half brought us to the meeting-house; about half a mile brought us to the meadows,

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where the lots lay along evenly ranged in beautiful and surprising o r d e r . 26

The diary records the impressions of a man surprised by the natural fertility and by the level of artificiality imposed on nature in the Connecticut Valley. Woodbridge was further moved to sketch the built environment, proof of the prosperity finally attained by many farmers (fig. 2). The drawing shows three meeting houses, one clearly "Delineated at Deerfield...Deerfield Meeting houses," the other two less certainly built in 27 Deerfield. The meeting house at the left nevertheless sits proudly in the center of the community flanked by two rows of orderly dwelling houses. Four buildings appear to be expensive, two-story houses with central chimneys; four more are sound, two-story, three-bay houses with end chimneys. A barn and other buildings are illustrated with less detail. Included from nature in this ordered environment is a cow, shade trees that fill an ornamental need, and tapered leaves resembling cultivated tobacco. The small figure of a man labors at the right to reap a profit from the rich soil.

At the bottom of the drawing (inverted), a substantial, two-story house with a central chimney, a framed overhang with carved pendants, and two ornamental pinnacles affixed to each gable equals the most fashionable 2 8 dwellings at the Bay. The drawing probably illustrates the house built for Ensign John Sheldon, a carpenter, at Deerfield by 1698. The house withstood the attack of 1704 and became a symbol of investment and perseverance in the Connecticut Valley. 2 9 Above Woodbridge's town portrait (at the left, on its side) is a probable drawing of Mount Sugar Loaf, "a remarkable peak in Deerfield....which was twelve minutes in climbing" and from which the cultivation 30 in other valley towns was visible for miles. Woodbridge

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Fig. 2. Dudley Woodbridge. (1705-1790), Sketches "Delineated at Deerfield," 1728. Ink on paper; H: 5 5/8" (14.2 cm.) W: 3 3/8" (8.5 cm.). Diary of Dr. Dudley Woodbridge, Massachusetts Historical Society.

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'himself best described the view of villages, farms, and buildings before him at the right of the drawing: "Convenient".

These "convenient" features, even Sugar Loaf which was mastered in twelve minutes, were defined within man's domain by Woodbridge. His satisfaction is traceable to the importance of the Pynchons' leadership and fortune in defining society for men as diverse as John Marsh and Philip Mattoon. The Pynchons' early settlement, favorable trade with the Indians, large investments in land and commercial agriculture, and the mediating role that the family played between provincial leaders and settlers assured their influence on the region's society and culture.

NOTES:

1. The affairs of other towns in New England were also orchestrated by small groups of leaders. For a comparison, see John J. Waters, Jr., "Hingham, Massachusetts, 1631-1661: An East Anglian Oligarchy in the New World," Journal of Social History, 1 (1967- 1968): 351-370; David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom to Massachusetts Bay in the Seventeenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), pp. 66-77. 2. Robert Child to Samuel Hartlib, 1645 December 24, in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 38 (1947-1951): 51; Darrett B. Rutman, "Governor Winthrop's Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 20, no. 3 (July 1963): 414-415. 3. Francis Murphy, e d ., The Diary of Edward Taylor (Springfield: Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, 1964) , p. 39. 4. Henry M. Burt, The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636-1736, 2 vols. (Springfield: 1898), 1:156-158.

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5. "Letters of William Pynchon," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 48 (1914-1915): 42-43. Pynchon is described as "being best exercised in the Indian tounge." 6. Ruth A. McIntyre, William Pynchon; Merchant and Colonizer, 1590-1662 (Springfield: Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, 1961), pp. 7-15. 7. Burt, Springfield, 1:161. 8. McIntyre, Pynchon, p . 18; "Letters of William Pynchon," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 48:35-51; Mason A. Green, Springfield, 1636-1886 (Springfield: C.A. Nichols & Company, 1888), pp. 29- 36. 9. Simeon E. Baldwin, "Secession of Springfield from Connecticut," Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 12 (1908-1909): 55-82. 10. Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New York, ed. B. Fernow, 15 vols. (Albany: 1881) , 13:21; McIntyre, Pynchon, p. 26. 11. Stephen Innes, "Land Tenancy and Social Order in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1652-1702," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 35, no. 1 (January 1978): 33-41, 53-54. 12. Joseph H. Smith, ed., Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts (1639-1702): The Pynchon Court Record (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 34- 36; Peter Allen Thomas, "In the Maelstrom of Change: The Indian Trade and Cultural Process in the Middle Connecticut Valley, 1635-1665" (Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1979), pp. 273-274; History of the Connecticut Valley, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1879), 1:325-326. The second-generation towns settled north of the Holyoke Range are Northampton (1654), Hadley (1659), Deerfield (1669) , Hatfield (1670) , Northfield (1671) , and Sunderland (1673). Deerfield, Northfield, and Sunderland were not permanently settled until the early eighteenth century. The second-generation towns settled in the Springfield area are Westfield (1658) , Suffield (1670), and Enfield (1681). The latter two towns seceeded from Massachusetts and were admitted to the General Assembly of Connecticut in 174 9. Longmeadow and West Springfield were established communities, but remained parishes of Springfield (1636) in the seventeenth century. Brookfield (1667) , now in Worcester County, was also part of Hampshire County in the seventeenth century. In 1761, Berkshire

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County was established west of the Connecticut River Valley. In 1811, Franklin County was chartered in the northern third of old Hampshire County. In 1812, Hampden County was founded in the southern third of old Hampshire County. 13. David Grayson Allen, "Vacuum Domicilium: The Social and Cultural Landscape of Seventeenth-Century New England," New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 1:2. 14. Allen, "Vacuum Domicilium," 1:4-7, 13-18; Robert Blair St. George, "'Set Thine House in Order': The Domestication of the Yeomanry in Seventeenth-Century New England," New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 Vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 2 :162-167 , 198^-201; Sumner Chilton Powell, Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1963), pp. 3-73, 165-171. 15. Paul R. Lucas, Valley of Discord: Church and Society along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725 (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976) , pp. 75-76. 16. Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905) , pp. 10-14; George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Deerfield: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1895) , 1 :6-12; Clifton Johnson, Historic Hampshire in the Connecticut Valley (Springfield: Milton Bradley Company, 1932), pp. 7-9. 17. Nathaniel Ward, The Simple Cobbler of Aggawam (London: 1647) as quoted in T.H. Breen and Stephen Foster, "The Puritans' Greatest Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts," Journal of American History, 60 (June 1973): 10. 18. Richard Melvoin, "Communalism in Frontier Deerfield" (Paper delivered at a colloquium at Historic Deerfield, Inc., 26 March 1983, on file at the Henry N. Flynt Library, Deerfield, MA.), pp. 1-29. 19. Smith, ed., Colonial Justice, pp. 103-128. 20. Sheldon, Deerfield, 2:239; Smith, ed., Colonial Justice, pp. 292-293. A carpenter and a sawyer, Mattoon was heavily fined in 1679 for assaulting the joiner, John Pope, in Springfield.

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21. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 2 (1678-1716), Vol. 3 (1692-1713), and Vol. 4 (1708-1780), Registry of Probate, Hampshire County Courthouse, Northampton, MA. 22. Sheldon, Deerfield, 1:283-453, 487-528; Judd, Hadley, pp. 78-85. 23. The amount of farm produce on hand fluctuates with the seasons. The time of death may skew the true value of produce actually grown on a farm in a given year. 24. Inventory of John Marsh, Hadley, 1725. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 4 (1708-1780), pp. 138- 140. 25. Judd, Hadley, pp. 368-370. 26. "Diary of Dr. Dudley Woodbridge," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 17 (1879-1880): 339. 27. Descriptions and partial building accounts survive for the meeting houses erected in Deerfield about 1673, 1682, and 1694. No large meeting house with a double turret is known to have been constructed. However, such a building was raised by the Allis family of joiners of Hatfield at West Springfield in 1702. Certainly, three such buildings did not stand in Deerfield at the time of Woodbridge's visit; nor do the drawings seem to depict the same building. Woodbridge may have illustrated meeting houses in several towns in his drawing, or he may have sketched Deerfield's three meeting houses in consultation with people who remembered the earlier buildings. 28. Abbott Lowell Cummings, The Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979), p. 144. 29. Sheldon, Deerfield, 1:277-278, 601-602; Amelia F. Miller, "The Indian House," Deerfield Alumni Journal, 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1960): 3-12. 30. "Diary of Dr. Dudley Woodbridge," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 17:339.

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William and John Pynchon led the citizens of western Massachusetts, sometimes against their will, during most of the seventeenth century. As T.H. Breen has noted, a man was deemed a good leader after the Glorious Revolution of 16 89 if he defended civil rights and property above the tenets of Puritanism. Despite a vested interest in promoting a healthy society to protect their holdings, the Pynchons retained the five qualities of a good magistrate outlined by Breen: wealth, piety, moderation, wisdom, and justice.^- Their leadership was strong enough to survive William's heresy in the 1650s and the desolation of King Philip's War a generation later. Only the Glorious Revolution threatened John Pynchon's control outside of Springfield when provincial appointments of local leaders in Hampshire County weakened his role as a power broker.

During the first decades of settlement in western Massachusetts, William Pynchon had carefully observed the unfolding of political and religious issues. As an influential magistrate of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, he knew that they were often closely related. Pynchon's own opinions were shaped in part by his quasi-independence in the Connecticut Valley and eventually caused him trouble. As the Civil War continued in England, the issues of religious and legal reform and of governmental control of private enterprise concerned most thinking Englishmen. Pynchon was wary of the discretionary behavior of fellow politicians who might limit his success, and he resented

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government's disrespect for private property. During the Connecticut controversy in the late 1630s, Pynchon had charged:

If magistrates in N.E. whould ex officio practice such a p[o]wer over mens properties [in this case, the impounding of a canoe by the government], how long would Tyranny be kept out of our habitations....The lawes of England count it a tender thing to touch another man1s property and therefor many have rather chosen to suffer as in a good cause than to yeeld their goods to the King ex officio: and to lose the liberty of an English subject in N.E. would bring woeful slaviry to our prosperity.2

Pynchon's later attack on the Puritan theocracy, however, fixed the limits of independent thinking on the frontier. Although he opposed religious toleration like other Puritans at the Bay, Pynchon felt that "this is not a 3 time of Reformation but of liberty of conscience." He remarked to John Winthrop in 1647 that "a world of good hath bin done by godly ministers...that have no certaine fourme of discipline," implying that the brethren and their 4 ministers were equal partners in church hierarchy. In 1650, his The Meritorious Price of our Redemption.... argued that "Christ did not suffer for us those un-utterable Torments of Gods Wrath...to redeem our Souls" and that God in His mercy would not have demanded that 5 Christ assume the sins of mankind. Instead, he inferred that the crucifixion was the mundane work of cruel men and that, by comparison, earthly governments like the Puritan theocracy ought not to limit the expansion of private enterprise.

Before the year was out, the Massachusetts General Court condemned the pamphlet, decreed its public burning, and subpoened the author for censure. Pynchon lost his commission as magistrate, but not his control of Hampshire

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County. His son-in-law, Henry Smith, was named in his place. The colony could ill-afford to lose its most effective representative on the frontier. Nevertheless, rather than recant, Pynchon transferred his lands, business affairs, and power to his son, John, and embarked for England with Smith and Springfield's minister, George Moxon, before the spring of 1652. Pynchon's retirement from business, however, was incomplete. During the remaining ten years of his life in Buckinghamshire, William refined his opinions about Christ's suffering and worked as John's agent, securing creditg to fund the family enterprise in western Massachusetts.

The Puritan penchant for making covenants was well designed to sustain the Pynchons' grip on leadership roles because it encouraged deference. Even in adversity or dissent, which only further disciplined the Puritan mind, a covenant with God, English law, family, or self was held inviolable. A covenant was a solemn agreement. Obedience to the Pynchons and to God was exchanged for welfare and salvation in western Massachusetts. William and John used the concept of covenant to secure the economic dependence of their neighbors and to obtain their respect. In trade, the Pynchons assured their constituency a secure community in which to live and their peers in Boston that all was well. Only when disruption occurred were offenders punished. No one was exempt, including the colony's leaders. Consequently, when William's examiners punished him for his pamphlet, they carefully reviewed the series of covenants that Pynchon had made with God, society, and himself before setting the severity of the sentence. In the final analysis, Pynchon was censured for the action of publishing a pamphlet rather than for his beliefs. They were among his inalienable rights as an Englishman as long as they did not openly challenge current dogma nor

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threaten to disrupt social tranquility. Pynchon's position and reputation in society, even after censure, were relatively secure because he had otherwise fulfilled his secular covenant as a valuable contributor to society in western Massachusetts and because punishment was construed as purification. English law and Protestantism maintained the status quo by allowing Pynchon (although he rejected the opportunity) to continue governing Hampshire County through his son-in-law. His censors recognized that the matrix of social and economic covenants on the colony's frontier would simply collapse without the Pynchon family's presence. While law and religion limited social mobility, they offered security to all strata of society in exchange 7 for orderliness and for acceptance of one's lot.

King Philip's War and the Glorious Revolution challenged the religious experiment of the Puritans in New England. Smug and secure in their covenanted communities, only the unexplained wrath of God forced yeomen to question their leaders and the institutions designed to police their society. On October 5, 1675, Springfield was burned by the Indians. Northampton, Hadley, and Hatfield were isolated from the relative safety of Connecticut. The inhabitants of Deerfield and Northfield had already abandoned their smoldering houses and fields. John Pynchon described the damage to his merchant son, John, Jr., in Boston.

About 30 or 32 dwelling houses are burnt down, and some twenty five barns, full of corn and hay. The Lord hath spared my dwelling house, but my barns and out-housing are all burned down, and all my corn and hay consumed; and not anything have I left of food, either for man or beast. All my mills, both corn and saw mills, are burnt down.®

Although Pynchon was able to regain his losses, the hostilities and droughts of the 1670s led ministers and

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laymen alike to question the course of the Protestant Reformation in New England and the civic leaders whose failures made the grand experiment seem less godly. Ministers were quick to intercede on behalf of their neighbors and to lead the attack upon worldiness. In 1675, Reverend Solomon Stoddard of Northampton wrote to Reverend Increase Mather in Boston.

I desire you would speak to the governor, that there may be some thorough care for a Reformation. I am sensible there are many difficulties therein; many sins are grown so in fashion, that it becomes a question whether they be sins or not. I desire you would especially mention...that intolerable pride in clothes and hair [wigs]; the toleration of so many taverns, especially in Boston, and suffering home-dwellers to lie tippling in them.^

As T.H. Breen noted, "Nehemiah replaced Moses as the model biblical ruler for the rising generation; Moses had built the 'City upon a Hill,1 now Nehemiah had to preserve it." Most ministers believed that the political leaders of New England lacked aptitude for personal reform. They told their congregations that the Puritan theocracy had faltered because its ministers had lost control of ecclesiastical concerns. Clergymen transformed their pulpits into political forums and urged freemen to cast out ineffectual leaders in order to restore religion and the ministry to their rightful places in society. The clerics introduced the practice of renewing the covenant and exhorted laymen to remember their responsibility to God. Histories of God's work in New England were written to remind people of their spiritual and financial investment.^ Memories of wilderness attacks, particularly the razing of Deerfield in 1704, were rekindled to rally survivors. As early as 1716, Samuel Sewall of Boston was taken by local

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dignitaries to view the sites of the Bloody Brook Massacre in the shadow of Mount Sugar Loaf and the victorious fight 12 at Turner's Falls north of Deerfield. In 1728, Dudley Woodbridge described "the ruins of a monument built of brick and stone, in' memory of a remarkable fight, called Muddy [sic] Brook Fight, being about fifty-two years ago last 13 August, wherein about seventy English were killed." The monument reminded passers-by of foreign brutality and the cost of establishing an orderly society.

Despite the propaganda of ministers, ecclesiastical preeminence was compromised by the Congregational system itself. The writers of the Cambridge Platform in 1648 had declared that the churches were "distinct; and therefore may not be confounded with one another: and equall, and therefore have not dominion one over another. Consequently, Congregational ministers had no formal organization in which to consolidate regional power. Church members controlled the purse strings and selected ministers whose philosophical leanings suited them. As Paul Lucas has suggested, "the Puritans' search for one kind of social order created the values and institutional 15 apparatus for quite another." Puritan laymen heeded too closely the ministerial call to control their secular leaders after the 1670s. The brethren chose rulers at town meetings who jealously guarded property. In the Connecticut Valley, scriptural law became a secondary concern. Settlers grumbled that neither God nor the General Court of Massachusetts were willing to provide adequate military protection.a. 4 . • 16

There was little experimentation with leadership. Freemen repeatedly elected men who displayed the greatest earthly accomplishment and who consequently had the most at stake in winning the battle against the harsh climate,

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Catholic-led heathens, religious backsliding, and the 17 vagaries of heavenly whim. According to Edward Cook, a high percentage of town offices were filled by men whose success prepared them for the demands of leadership. Wealthier men were also more liable to serve as officers because leadership often constituted a financial burden in the seventeenth century. Northampton freemen voted in 1674 that no unmarried man need fill the post of selectman more than every other year. The same procedure was adopted at 18 Hadley. Despite uncertainty, farmers in western Massachusetts turned to men like John Pynchon for practical leadership rather than to ministers to guide society.

In exchange for deference, however, freemen demanded near perfection from their leaders in the grave matter of coordinating the fulfillment of their covenant with God. When the first charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was revoked in 1684 and Edmund Andros received a royal appointment to govern the new Dominion of New England, colonists resented the Crown's interference and higher 19 taxes. They wondered how their elected officials had failed them. Leaders like John Pynchon were forced to choose between their constituency or consolidating power in the new government. 20 Pynchon was successful m the latter, but when the hated Andros was overthrown five years later, Pynchon's hold on western Massachusetts was shaken, and new secular leaders like Samuel Partridge of Hatfield and Samuel Porter of Hadley gained political appointments in the redesigned government of Massachusetts. In response, the clergymen in the Connecticut Valley, removed from the full religious influence of the Massachusetts Bay, turned toward Presbyterianism and its hierarchy of church councils as a means of promoting clerical authority as the saviour of society. They were led by Solomon Stoddard

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whose independent stance and intellectual zeal institutionalized autonomous religious thought in western Massachusetts.

Solomon Stoddard was born into the family of a wealthy Boston merchant in 1643. Trained at Harvard College where his personal library included The Due Right of Presbyteries by Samuel Rutherford, Stoddard was ordained 21 at Northampton in 1669. He confronted a society torn by the Half-Way Covenant, which brought the grandchildren of full church members under clerical control without evidence of conversion in their baptized parents. Northampton had adopted the Half-Way principle over the wishes of the town's first minister, Eleazar Mather, as he lay on his deathbed. Mather had feared the loss of authority to the laity, who believed that the disintegration of society could be halted by broadening church membership through an emphasis on personal conduct rather than on religious conversion.

Stoddard tried a different tactic and catapulted himself into the limelight of preeminence and near heresy. He agreeably told his parishioners to accept good behavior over conversion in conferring church membership. In reality, Stoddard expanded the meaning of the Half-Way Covenant by offering full membership to moral half-way parishioners. He felt that the "pure" church was counter-productive because it excluded most people from clerical care. Instead, Stoddard stood for a national church committed to the evangelistic goal of saving sinners. He promoted clerical authority over purity by widening church membership and by undermining the power of existing members. Like William Pynchon, who stopped short of espousing religious toleration, Stoddard did not support universal salvation. He qualified church

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membership as a reward for visible saints before an 22 omnipotent and rational God.

Stoddard challenged the Puritan concept of predestination and made enemies among his Congregational colleagues, including the Mathers in Boston and Edward Taylor of Westfield. Yet, he stood firmly upon something that they did not: a broadening regional power base. Stoddard's Presbyterian beliefs expanded the intent of the consociationalism approved by the Synod of 1662, which decreed that individual churches were not autonomous but were joined in "communion" under the rule of Christ. Stoddard's meetings with fellow ministers facilitated the perfection of his doctrine, the appointment of acceptable ministers in valley towns, and the mediation of local disputes.2 ^

Solomon Stoddard further solidified his position by creating the Hampshire Association with his son-in-law, Reverend William Williams of Hatfield. The organization 24 was chartered in 1714 and included only ministers. Eventually, many of the clergymen in the county boycotted membership because of Stoddard's extreme philosophy rather than because of an aversion to ministerial meetings. The Association nevertheless met regularly to perfect Stoddard's principles that a thorough understanding of the Gospel was the only road to salvation and that powerful preaching was the sole vehicle for realizing fulfillment. However, Stoddard's use of evangelism as a means of checking the power of the laity met only moderate success. After his colleague, Nathaniel Collins, was forced from the pulpit in Enfield by his parishioners, the Association 25 proved effective only in northern Hampshire County.

Both Stoddard and John Pynchon remained leaders by incorporating the citizenry in systems of religious and

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economic activity that they controlled. Stoddard's shifting Presbyterianism grew within semi-isolation to institutional proportions and taught the ideal philosophy of federation for protecting society from the environment, military attack, and itself. Similarly, the Pynchon dynasty underwrote prosperity in western Massachusetts during most of the seventeenth century. Their dual constituency, however, eventually invoked the covenant with leadership by expanding the role of the town meeting. Local government provided a means of achieving a consensus opinion in the face of adversity and of filling the void of disillusionment with traditional leaders. Town meetings brought the maximum number of voters into the political process where they could safely debate issues previously 2 6 mandated by the party line. Buffeted by ill winds, most settlers in the seventeenth century saw the value of John Winthrop's wish in 1630 that "We must be knitt together in this worke as one man." 27 But second-generation settlers resentful of Andros' Dominion were no longer willing to have a single man speak for them. Conformity was nurtured 2 8 and finally enforced by town meeting government. If the strain grew too great, as in the case of John Russell and his followers in Wethersfield, there was unity in consolidation and removal.

Apathy also weakened the grip of traditional leadership during peacetime. Freemen were content to allow the business agents of the town, the selectmen, to handle local affairs. The town clerk of Springfield recorded on April 14, 1674, that even the issue of expanding the meeting house could not draw a quorum, so the selectmen 2 9 were instructed to act as they saw fit. As the population of New England grew and commerce increased, improved methods of regulating the exchange of produce were required, and more town officers were elected or appointed

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to handle specific duties. Connecticut towns, which averaged fifty to sixty officers in 1725, counted twice that number before the Revolution. As society in western Massachusetts grew more stable during the early eighteenth century, it became more difficult for a single individual to amass enough power to sway public sentiment.

Although the Pynchons and Stoddard refined the institutions surrounding the economy and moral order, another institution sustained society and instilled a strong sense of place in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts. The family was the foundation of the cultural superstructure choreographed by the leadership. The demands, dependence, and deference of families perpetuated the Pynchons1 oligarchy and Stoddard's Presbyterianism. It was family commitment that built and defended the human environment of roads, fences, houses, and furnishings recorded by Dudley Woodbridge.

As the basic economic unit in an agricultural society, the family relied upon its members to maximize production through a strict adherence to traditional 31 farming methods and through a division of labor. Frontier individualism did not exist in western Massachusetts. At Hadley, for example, eighty (85.1%) of the ninety-four resident heads of household with taxable estates shared their surname with at least one other head of household in 172.0. Furthermore, forty-six (48.9%) heads of household lived next door to people with the same surname. In total, only thirty-three names are found on 32 the tax list for that year. The charting of in-laws and cousins with different surnames would document a larger network of family interdependence in Hadley.

Kinship ties spread from town to town, assuring favorable trade connections and the maintenance of social

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institutions. In political circles during the seventeenth century, members of prominent families became entrenched in local leadership positions despite the availability of more qualified candidates. Between 1697 and 1700 in Hatfield, over nine-tenths of the town's proven leaders were reelected in annual polling. The Pynchon family continued to wield political power in the eighteenth century despite the increasing prosperity of other families. Six Pynchons served forty-nine years as judges of the Inferior Court of Hampshire County, and nine Pynchons filled one-fourth (24.5%) of all terms of office in the town government of Springfield during the eighteenth century. Similarly, the Partridge family filled 33 three-tenths (29%) of all town offices in Hatfield. In all, the Pynchons joined their in-laws and colleagues in the Ashley, Dwight, Partridge, Porter, Stoddard, and Williams families to account for forty-six of ninety-three men (49.5%) who were appointed justices of the peace in Hampshire County between 1692 and 1774; twenty-seven of thirty-one men (87.9%) appointed County or Probate Judges; and all of the men appointed to the rank of major or above 34 in the Hampshire County militxa.

Similarly, the preeminence of Solomon Stoddard as the leading cleric in western Massachusetts was based on family ties. Seven of his sons, sons-in-law, and step sons-in-law were ministers. In total, the three succeeding generations of his family counted at least forty-one ministers, who, like Stoddard, exerted religious, political, and social influence on their towns. Although a few of Stoddard's progeny disagreed with him, all of them felt his presence. Stoddard's extended family of ministers shaped the expectations of society every Sabbath in dozens of towns around Massachusetts and Connecticut during most of the eighteenth century.

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Like politicians and ministers, whose education and prominence led them to seek spouses among their own kind, men in other occupations also often married the sisters and daughters of the men with whom they worked or apprenticed. This social phenomenon is reflected in the personal lives of men in the building trades. The labors of joiners, turners, carpenters, glaziers, and masons in large shops or on construction sites brought their work and lives together. In Hatfield and Hadley, for example, the related Allis-Belden-Dickinson-Partridge-Gaylord families counted at least sixteen woodworkers over five generations.

The network of cousinage was wide and dictated the work loads of family members. Samuel Billings of Hatfield, for example, was occasionally called upon by his in-laws for masonry and carpentry work. In 1701, Hatfield selectmen engaged Ichabod Allis and Samuel Belden, Jr., to enlarge the pulpit in the meeting house that they had erected in 1699. Billings assisted by carting lumber and by "scoring small timber" to be cut into rails and stiles for the minister's desk and perhaps into floor joists for 35 the platform. Like most early tradesmen, Billings supplemented his specialized work as a mason with seasonal labor of other types for men whom he already knew.

Billings was in a good position for nepotism; perhaps his trade had been preordained by family anticipation of the need for someone with masonry skills. Typical of the tight network in craftsmen's families, Billings' mother married Samuel Belden, Jr., in 1678 when the young man was ready to learn a trade; he was thirteen years old. Billings' half-sister, Mary, married Ichabod Allis about 1698. Meanwhile, two of Billings' sisters, Sarah and Hannah, married about 1700 nephews of Lieutenant Nehemiah and Obadiah Dickinson, joiners in Hadley and

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36 Wethersfield.

On a single job, men from several towns might work together for some time. In 1677, for example, the freemen of Springfield decided to build a new meeting house, and John Pynchon engaged John Allis, the father of Ichabod, to oversee the construction. Allis was paid the large sum of 4 140 for the frame, plus other expenses, but he was not alone in the work. He was assisted by local joiners, carpenters, glaziers, and teamsters; some were related to him, others were related among themselves. In all, fifteen 37 men worked directly on the building. Several more men sold construction materials or transported them to the site. John Allis laid the foundation and framed the building with the aid of Isaac Gleason of Enfield, Nathaniel Munn of Springfield, and Jonathan Bush of Springfield. John's brother, Samuel Allis, was a turner and provided all of the banisters and decorative columns to support the gallery. He was assisted by Daniel Beamon of Springfield and Deerfield. George Norton of Suffield, Victory Sikes of Suffield and Springfield, Samuel Marshfield of Springfield, and John Pope of Springfield shingled and clapboarded the turreted building. Norton, also an accomplished joiner, did the flooring. He was helped by Jonathan Burt, who later installed the window cornices, and by John Lamb. Both men lived in Springfield. John Gilbert of Springfield glazed the windows with the help of his son, Thomas. John Pope was apparently Springfield's best finish joiner and carver. He was hired to build the pulpit, deacons' bench, 3 8 and other interior woodwork.

The finished meeting house testified to the efficient coordination of labor by tradesmen who worked well together because of peer pressure, family pride, and their long association with one another. The covenant

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among family members reinforced the execution of sound workmanship and made the relationships between cousins the backbone of the local economy in western Massachusetts. The combined efforts of informal family corporations charted the course of prosperity encouraged by families of community leaders. An examination of the careers of Samuel Billings and another mason, Nathaniel Phelps of Northampton (who was related to the Warner and Montague families of joiners in Hadley), illustrates the close relationship between the economy and the workmen in the building trades from 1685 to 1747.

As the following graphs show (charts 1,2,3), Billings constructed more chimneys and earned more credit during 1686-1689 and 1691-1695 than at any other period in his career. These favorable times were interrupted by the course of King William's War. Although fighting raged throughout most of the 1690s, Billings' best years, 1691- 1693, coincided with relative peace in the Connecticut Valley when the brunt of warfare was felt in southern New Hampshire and Maine. He earned nearly a third of his recorded income during this period. When plenty of masonry work was available, Billings devoted most of his time in the warmer months to his trade rather than to agricultural labor, which accounted for only a tenth (12.1%) of his 39 income during those good years. Similarly, the work of Nathaniel Phelps in constructing chimneys in Northampton between 1727 and 1747 was affected by the French and Indian threat, the demand for produce at Hartford and Boston, and the confidence of his neighbors in the future (chart 4). Phelps built five or six chimneys during the warm months of each year at an average cost of 1 4.16.11 each, a sizeable income that charts a significant building boom 40 after the threat of attack lessened.

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1704

1703 1702 1701 1700 1699 1698 16971695 16961694 1693 1692 1691 1690 1689 1688 1687 1686 1685 Hatfield, Massachusetts. 4 4 10 CHART Annual1. Income fromMasonry, Samuel Billings 1665), (b. Hatfield, 1685-1704.^ Pounds (4) 1. 1. Ledger of Samuel Billings, Hatfield, 1685-1716. Hatfield Historical Society, YEAR

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. CHART 2. Annual Construction of Chimneys, Samuel Billings (b. 1665), Hatfield, 1685-1704.1

Number of Chimneys

1685 1687 1689 1691 1693 1695 1697 1699 1701 1703 YEAR 1686 1688 1690 1692 1694 1696 1698 1700 1702 1704

1. Ledger of Samuel Billings, Hatfield, 1685-1716. Hatfield Historical Society, Hatfield, Massachusetts. 41

CHART 3. Sources of Income, Samuel Billings (b. 1665), Hatfield, 1691-1693.1

KEY:

Activity Title Subtotal (%) Total Masonry A 29.0 29.0 Farm Produce B1 17.5 Farm Labor B2 12.1 Sale of Livestock B3 8.7 38.3 and Butchering Carting C1 8.4 Rental of Animals c 2 2.7 11.1 and Tools Sale of Land D1 12.5 Sale of Tools D2 4.2 Sale of Wood d 3 2.2 18.9 Miscellany E 2.7 2.7 100.0 100.0

1. Ledger of Samuel Billings, Hatfield, 1685-1716, Hatfield Historical Society, Hatfield, Massachusetts. Billings earned 1 48.6.6 from 1691 through 1693.

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Northampton, 1727-1747.1 1728 1728 1730 1732 1734 1736 1738 1740 1742 1744 1746 1727 1727 1729 1731 1733 1735 1737 1739 1741 1743 1745 1747 constructed 112 chimneys and debited annual his patrons income 1 from 542.19.6. chimney construction was 4 His 25.17.1; average the average cost of a chimney was 4 4.16.11. Association, Deerfield, Massachusetts. Between 1727 and 1747, Phelps 11 10 of Number CHART Annual4. Construction of Chimneys, Nathaniel Phelps 1692, d. (b. 1747), Chimneys 1. 1. Ledger of Nathaniel Phelps, Northampton, 1723-1747. Pocumtuck Valley Memorial YEAR

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Before King Philip's War and the Glorious Revolution, the Pynchons controlled most aspects of society in western Massachusetts. By the early eighteenth century, matters of politics, religion, and business were coordinated by several families who trained their sons in a specialized activity or trade that contributed to the 41 well-being of society and to their own security. The Pynchons' corporate investments became linked with Stoddard's broadly-based, hierarchic religion through intermarriage. Their policies became the directives of freemen wielding power through the expanded importance of town meetings. The resulting homogeneity ran deep. The family was the basic unit of both social and economic life. Interrelated families supported local institutions created by leaders who were somewhat isolated from the Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. At the end of the century, Timothy Dwight, like Woodbridge before him, described the orderliness and homogeneity of Hatfield. He found that the legacy of the Pynchons, Stoddard, and the rich farm land had been fully realized. Insularity and self-satisfaction were part of a proud heritage to pass on.

The inhabitants have for a long period been conspicuous for uniformity of character. They have less intercourse with their neighbors than those of most other places. An air of silence and retirement appears everywhere. Except travelers, few persons are seen abroad besides those who are employed about their daily business. This seclusion probably renders them less agreeable to strangers, but certainly contributes to their prosperity. Accordingly, few farming towns are equally distinguished either for their prosperity or their thrift. Men who devote themselves to their own concerns usually manage them well.42

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NOTES:

1. T.H. Breen, The Character of.the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England,. 1630-1730 (1970; reprint ed., New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974), p p . xii, 8. 2. "Letters of William Pynchon," Proceedings Of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 48 (1914-1915): 47-48; Joseph H . Smith, ed., Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts (1639-1702): The Pynchon Court Record (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 18-19. On March 9, 1646/7, Pynchon wrote to John Winthrop, for as we had the happinesse to be bredd and borne under such lawes for civill government as I conceive no nation hath better, so it should be our care...to preserve and adhere to what ever lawes or customes they have except those that be contrary to God, and therein we must obey God and not man, and yet we have liberty from that pattent to make what soever by lawes may tend to the good of this place. 3. William Pynchon to John Winthrop, 1646 August 7, "Winthrop Papers," Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 4th Series, 40 (1947), 5:91. 4. William Pynchon to John Winthrop, 1646/7 March 9, "Winthrop Papers," 5:136. 5. William Pynchon, The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption.... (London: 1650); Smith, ed., Colonial Justice, pp. 25-27. 6. Smith, ed., Colonial Justice, pp. 28-31; Ruth A. McIntyre, William Pynchon: Merchant and Colonizer, 1590-1662 (Springfield: Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, 1961), p. 35; Bonds, William Pynchon to William Bower, 1662 May 22 and 1662 May 24, photo copies on file at the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, MA. Pynchon also published The Jewes Synagogue: or a Treatise Concerning the Ancient Orders and Manner of Worship Used by the Jewes in Their Synagogue-Assemblies (London: 1652) , The Time When the First Sabbath Was Ordained (London: 1654), and The Covenant Of Grace with Adarrt Described Artd Cleared from Sundry Grea:t Mistakes (London: 1662) , which was his rejoinder to the Massachusetts General Court.

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7. Michael Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (1970; reprint ed. , New York: Vintage Books, 1972), pp. 54-56. 8. John Pynchon to John Pynchon, Jr., 1675 October as quoted in.. J.G. Holland, History of Western Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Springfield: S. Bowles and Company, 1855), 1:95-96, 99. 9. Solomon Stoddard to Increase Mather, 1675 September 15, as quoted in Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including.the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), p. 136. 10. Breen, Good Ruler, pp. 99-100, 106, 109, 149. The reference to Nehemiah and Moses is taken from a sermon by Jonathan Mitchell, Nehemiah on the Wall in Troublesome Times (Cambridge: 1671). 11. For example, see Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (London:.1702) and William Hubbard, The Present State of New England (London: 1677). 12. M. Halsey Thomas, ed., The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-172 9, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973), 2:830. 13. "Diary of Dr. Dudley Woodbridge," Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 17 (1879-1880): 339. 14. Williston Walker, ed., The Creeds and Platforms of Congregationalism (New York: Charles Scribner, 1893) , pp. 229-230. 15. Paul R. Lucas, Valley of Discord: Church and Society along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725 (Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976), pp. 60, 206; Linda A. Bissell, "From One Generation to Another: Mobility in Seventeenth-Century Windsor, Connecticut," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 31, no. 1 (January 1974): 93. 16. Breen, Good Ruler, pp. 193-194; Bruce C. Daniels, "Connecticut's Villages Become Mature Towns: The Complexity of Local Institutions, 1676-1776," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 34, no. 1 (January 1977): 89. Absentee representation also created tension. Benjamin Davis, for example, represented Springfield in 1694, although he lived in Boston. 17. Breen, Good Ruler, pp. 8-15.

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18. Edward M. Cook, Jr.,..The Fathers of the. Towns: Leadership and CommUriity Structure in Eighteenth-Century. New, England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 86. 19. Viola F. Barnes, The Dominion of New England: A Study in British Colonial Policy (1923; reprint ed., New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, 1960) , pp. 47-101. 20. Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 151-170; Cook, Fathers of the Towns, pp. 19-20, 82, 101, 131, 150. The new charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, adopted in 1691, broadened suffrage by lowering the qualification for freemanship from possession of 1 80 to 1 20 worth of property. 21. Norman S. Fiering, "Solomon Stoddard's Library at Harvard in 1664," Harvard Library Bulletin, 20 (1972): 255-269; Lucas, Valley Of Discord,.pp. 85, 87-89, 107, 146-149; James R. Trumbull, History of Northampton, 2 vols. (Northampton: Gazette Printing Company, 1898), 1:147, 210-213. 22. Patricia J. Tracy, Jonathan Edwards, Pastor: Religion and Society in Eighteenth-Century Northampton (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), pp. 13-50; James P. Walsh, "Solomon Stoddard's Open Communion: A Reexamination," New England Quarterly, 43, no. 2 (March 1970): 100; Lucas, Valley of Discord, pp. 152-154. The "elect" in Northampton did not formally adopt Stoddard's interpretation of the Half-Way Covenant until 1690. 23. Lucas, Valley of Discord, pp. 113-115, 131, 136, 144. 24. Northampton Church Records, Vol. 1 (unpaginated), 1714 December 9. Microfilm copy, Forbes Library, Northampton, MA. 25. Lucas, Valley of Discord, pp. 193-195. 26. Breen, Good Ruler, pp. 48-50. Only freemen, who met certain property qualifications, could vote in a town meeting. 27. John Winthrop as.quoted in Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650 (1933; reprint ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1970) , p. 224 . 28. Zuckerman, Peaceable Kingdoms, pp. 46-50. 29. Springfield Town Records, Vol. 3, p. 83 as quoted in Henry M. Burt, The First Century of the History of

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Springfield; The Official Records from 1636-1736, 2 vols. (Springfield: 1898), 2:120-121; Breen, Good Ruler, pp. 51-53. 30. Bruce C. Daniels,.The Connecticut Town: Growth and Development, 1635-1790 (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1979), pp. 79-83, 90-92. 31. Cook, Fathers of the Towns, pp. 70-73. 32. Tax Inventory, Hadley, January 1720, as quoted in Judd, Hadley, pp. 278-279. 33. Cook, Fathers of the Towns, pp. 19-20, 82, 101, 150. Cook also notes that, although church membership was not a requirement for election, communicants remained in office longer than non-church members (p. 131). 34. Kevin M. Sweeney, "Mansion People: The River Gods and Material Culture" (Paper delivered at a colloquium at Historic Deerfield, Inc., 20 March 1982, on file at the Henry N. Flynt Library, Deerfield, MA.), p. 3; Keven M. Sweeney, "River Gods in the Making: The Williamses of Western Massachusetts," The Bay and the River: 1600-1900, Annual Proceedings of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folk Life, 6 (1981): 108-110. 35. Ledger, Samuel Billings, Hatfield (1685-1716), Hatfield Historical Society, Hatfield, MA., pp. 11, 14, 16, 53, 71, 76. 36. Judd, Hadley, Part II, "Genealogies," pp. 10, 12. 37. Springfield Town Records, Vol. 3, pp. 113-115, as quoted in Burt, Springfield, 2:157-163. 38. Ledgers of John Pynchon, 6 vols., Springfield (1652- 1702), Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, MA., 5:527. 39. Ledger, Samuel Billings, Hatfield (1685-1716). 40. Ledger, Nathaniel Phelps, Northampton (1723-1747), Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, MA. 41. James A. Henretta, "Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 35, no. 1 (January 1978): 20-31. 42. Timothy Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ed. Barbara Solomon, 4.vols. (1821; reprint ed., Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 2:35.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. IV LEADERSHIP/ FAMILY/ AND DESIGN

The insular homogeneity/ recorded by Woodbridge and Dwight, was perpetuated by prospering families of leaders and farmer-tradesmen who strove to impose their will on the 1 natural environment. Their covenant to achieve security and comfort is demonstrated in the joined furniture made for Hampshire County households between 1680 and 1730. John Pynchon's private funding of community projects was the principal fuel of security in western Massachusetts during the seventeenth century. The magistrate's patronage of craftsmen of his choice on behalf of the community assured deference and dictated the appearance of local products. His neighbors' indebtedness to him prevented a normal blending of traditions by natural selection. Instead, Pynchon's network of dependence and deference often decided personal achievement in Hampshire County and where new investments would occur, particularly during the rebuilding period after King Philip's War. Although Pynchon's debtors may have despised his authority, men like Philip Mattoon had little choice but to do as he requested (pp. 12-13). Otherwise, such men risked foreclosure by Pynchon on their meager property. On the other hand, the magistrate's patronage of a craftsman on behalf on the town elevated the financial security of one tradesman over another and gave the patron and craftsman alike the opportunity to impose their personal tastes and backgrounds on other people. For example, when Pynchon credited John Allis of Hatfield "By allowing you [1 130] for Building the [Springfield] Meeting-house [and] gallery i 10" on

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3 behalf of the town in 1676/77, his selection simultaneously affected two local economies in Hampshire County. While Springfield joiners were denied the large contract (although many of them worked with Allis on the job), a Hatfield joiner was selected to oversee construction of the meeting house in the county's principal town. Similarly, Pynchon paid the joiner, John Pope, for "making the Pulpit Canopee, Deacon's seate, and stairs (in the Springfield meeting house] 1 5.10.0...By my Pew 1 4.10.0... 4 By a Table in my Pew 1 1.0.3...By my wife's Pew 1 3.10.0." Like Allis, Pope received major credit from a private source largely on behalf of the town. The ornamentation of the pulpit (now lost) undoubtedly became a major visual influence on the decorative vocabulary of the towspeople 5 every time they went to their pews. Consequently, Pope's personal training and Pynchon's approbation came to reflect the taste of the entire town, not through the agreement of their neighbors, but through the patronage of a single, wealthy man. Furthermore, the credit that Allis and Pope accrued from Pynchon established their reputations, assured more business, and attracted skillful apprentices, who perpetuated their masters' styles. Significantly, the detailed accounts of public construction in Springfield during the seventeenth century appear more regularly in Pynchon's ledgers than in the town's records.

A legacy of the joiners who were promoted directly or indirectly by Pynchon composes one of the largest groups of related American furniture. Approximately 175 chests with drawers, chests of drawers, boxes, and tables survive with similar ornament and construction details that upon close inspection can be divided into sixteen variants, plus four types of uncarved examples. This large survival of expensive joined furniture represents several shops in

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towns covering about 750. square miles and is unique in early New England. In other rural regions, the style and execution of joinery often differed radically from town to g town. Hampshire County joined furniture, however, displays a tulip-and-leaf motif and was made in towns that marked the boundaries of the Pynchons' influence (fig. 3).

The large number of related shop traditions in western Massachusetts resulted from the melding of second-generation attitudes about joinery fostered by the Pynchon oligarchy and sustained by related families in a prospering but remote corner of New England. Although a single, anonymous joiner may have introduced the design, it was a perception of acceptable taste, approved by the Pynchons and encouraged by their patronage of dependent workmen and consumers, that homogenized the appearance of joined furniture and other trappings of life in Hampshire County houses. There is no doubt that Pynchon dominance molded a distinct economy and society in western Massachusetts. It is no mere coincidence that these similar chests were found in Enfield and Suffield, now in Connecticut, sixty miles northward to Deerfield and Northfield, the same towns created and supported by the Pynchon family in the seventeenth century (fig. 4).

The products of joiners, whether a meeting house, a dwelling, or even a chest, were often the work of many men. Their additions to the built environment of western Massachusetts during the reconstruction period after King Philip's War were hybrids of shared joinery and building traditions learned elsewhere. The work of each tradesman was shaped as much by mutual observation on the job as by the English provincial origins of the men who trained them. In the case of Springfield's meeting house, the fifteen men who worked on the building were all trained in New England;

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Fig. 3. Box, Springfield Area, circa 1700. Oak and yellow pine (no microanalysis); H: 9 3/8" (23.8 cm.) W: 2 5 V (64.1 cm.) D: 1 6 V (41.9 cm.). Ex Coll. John Kenneth Byard. Historic Deerfield, Inc.

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Fig. 4. Joined Chest with Two Drawers, Inscribed "NDM/ 1700," Springfield Area, circa 1700. Oak, walnut, yellow pine, and sycamore (no microanalysis); H: 41 7/8" (106.4 cm.) W: 53V (135.2 cm.) D: 20" (50.8 cm.). The applied balusters and moldings are replaced. Ex Coll. William Skinner. Greenwich (CT.) Historical Society. The- chest may'.have been made for Nathaniel and Margaret (Pynchon) Downing at the time of their marriage.: The bride was the granddaughter of John Pynchon of Springfield*

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only two of them were born in England, John Gilbert (b. 1626) and John Pope. (b.c. 1625).^

The "Americanization" of English joinery methods was achieved through the realignment of family networks in the New World. In western Massachusetts, strong traditions also developed and, like the beliefs of politicians and ministers, were perpetuated within families of joiners. From a compilation of about four hundred woodworkers who labored in Hampshire County between 1636 and 1730, some sixty-seven principal joiners and turners have been identified. Forty of these men worked in seventeen shop traditions where at least two related artisans practiced 8 their trades simultaneously or in consecutive generations. Some of these men worked primarily as house joiners and carpenters and may not have produced a quantity of furniture. As we have seen, most tradesmen mixed the sources of their incomes to fill available working time each season. Nevertheless, all of these men have left evidence in the written record that they were joiners or turners who earned most of their livelihoods from these skills at some time during their lives.

The circumstances surrounding the source and selection of the tulip-like flower and attached leaf remain obscure, but are also linked to family dynamics. In England, the motif is seen on joined furniture made in the northern counties, principally in Lancashire, Cheshire, and g southern Yorkshire. It is known that George Moxon, Springfield's first minister and a man of influence, was probably born near Wakefield in Yorkshire and that he administered a parish in Lancashire before emigration.^ However, he returned to England in 1652, three decades before the characteristic joinery of western Massachusetts appeared during the rebuilding period after King Philip's

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War. Little furniture is documented to ownership in Hampshire County before the burning of most towns in 1675.

None of the first-generation joiners in Hampshire County whose parentage is known and the father of only one second-generation joiner may have come from the north of 11 England (Samuel Belden, Sr., of Hatfield). However, John Pope, who built the prominent pulpit in Springfield's meeting house, was probably born in England about 1625. While the origins of his father, of the same name, are unidentified, the family had settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, by 1634 when John, Jr., was approaching the time of apprenticeship. Although Dorchester was first settled by people from Dorset, Somerset, and Devon in southwestern England, another contingent of immigrants arrived in 1636 and 1637 from Lancashire. 12 Perhaps John Pope's master was among them.

Another cultural influence on decorative selection in western Massachusetts was generated by the dozen or so Scottish war prisoners who were taken during the English Civil War and were among Springfield's early settlers. Indentured to William Pynchon, these Scotsmen were entirely dependent upon the magistrate for their livelihoods even after they purchased their freedom, but, as Stephen Innes has demonstrated, they were also skilled tradesmen whose abilities were vital to Pynchon in developing Springfield. Consequently, their families found a secure, respected place in the economy of indebtedness that supported the 13 Pynchon oligarchy. No doubt they also retained memories of their decorative heritage in northern England and Scotland. Although none of these men is remembered as a joiner, the ethnic presence of their families must have reinforced the selection of the tulip-and-leaf motif in the community. Whatever the source, it is probable that the

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concept was introduced by one or perhaps two joiners (in Springfield and Hatfield) and that its subsequent adaptation was reinforced by the Pynchons1 patronage and by extended families of artisans, who worked generations after settlement throughout western Massachusetts.

The processing of timber products and the construction of houses and furniture during the rebuilding periods after each Indian war funded the Pynchons* prominence and promoted the woodworking trades in Hampshire County. Lumber for building, fuel, and commercial purposes was plentiful. Sound cooperage, for example, was required for the trade in produce and furs and drew heavily upon the lumber supply. John Pynchon*s account with Springfield's cooper, John Matthews, in 166 9 illustrates the number of barrels bartered during an eight-month period and how patronage supported society. Matthews was credited "By 12 barells for [packing] meate, the rest you have allowed viz 20 [barrels] toward Rent of the meddow land in the neck: So that there is but 12 [barrels] to Reckne for to this tyme: at 3s. 9d. per barrell [1] '2.5.0o"^ Similarly, the sale of lumber and its by-products was among the principal commercial endeavors of the Pynchons. Barrels of turpentine and thousands of board feet of lumber were channeled through Springfield and down the Connecticut River. On June 29, 1675, for example, Pynchon "Agreed with Medad Pomery for 180 good oake Planks, Inch and quarter thick when sawne, to be delivered at the foote of the falls [at Enfield] 7s. 6d per 100 [board feet]."^ The business continued under John Pynchon III (1674-1741). In the fall of 1703, Daniel Beamon was credited 4 2.10.8 for the freight of thirty-eight pounds of turpentine to Hartford. Between June of 1706 and May of 1707, John Harmon was credited 1 6 4 5.13.6 for a load of cedar and 5,076 feet of boards. At times, the river bank at Springfield must have been a

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maze of barrels and towering stacks of freshly cut lumber.

Joiners, like Benjamin Barrett of Hatfield and Deerfield, used their tools on some of these raw materials to make a comfortable, artificial environment in the Connecticut Valley. A steady application of skills marked a regular contribution to society and to the establishment of an orderly, prosperous life. Barrett's first contribution to Hampshire County was as a soldier during King Philip's War. He later settled in Hatfield and married Sarah, the daughter of Isaac Graves, Sr., in 1677. The couple moved to Deerfield where Barrett died thirteen 17 years later. When Barrett's probate inventory was taken, his tools included:

To 1 Square 2s rule 2.6 handsaw 5^ holdfast 4.0 1 plow [plane] 3.6 17.0 To 3 Creasing [molding] plaines 5.0 1 Joyntr 5.0 2 Smoothing planes 4.0 14.0 To 1 open Rabbit [plane] 2.6 3 round planes 3.0 2 hollow plaines 2.0 3 chizels 4.0 11.6 To 1 gouge 1.0 Compass Saw 1.6 1 auger 1.6 3 augers 4.6 8.6 To 1 Shave 2.0 1 fro 2.0 other small Tooles 4 1 1 plane 1.0 4 1.5.0 old crosscut saw 2.0 1

These tools, totalling 4 3.18.6, constituted a considerable investment and were precisely the ones required to make joined chests. Barrett used the crosscut saw to cut the oak to appropriate lengths. He used the froe to rive the billets of oak into desired widths and thicknesses. The holdfast secured the parts on the bench while he measured them with his rule and trimmed them with his handsaw. To dress the panels, drawer parts, and lid, Barrett chose the smoothing planes to make flat surfaces, the jointer plane to give the parts of the chest straight edges, and the creasing planes to incise moldings in the rails and stiles.

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The rabbet plane was used to make the bottom boards of the chest and the drawer fit tightly. Barrett's plow plane shaped the grooves in the edges of the rails and stiles to receive the panels. He used an auger to drill holes for the mortises which were finished to rectangular shapes with chisels. Barrett made the corresponding tenons with the handsaw or the compass saw, which was normally used to cut round shapes. (Other joiners' inventories specifically 19 list "tennant" saws. ) The augers also drilled the holes into which wooden pins were driven to bind the mortises and tenons together. An auger and the compass saw cut the keyhole. The square assured plumb joints. Barrett used the gouge to carve ornament on the facade of the chest. Aware of the time invested in constructing joined furniture, Barrett also probably employed many of these tools to make less expensive furniture of nailed pine boards in order to 20 reach a broader clientele. Board chests are recorded in the inventories of rich and poor alike in western Massachusetts.

The workmanship of Barrett and his peers was regulated by their training and by the wishes of their customers. The patronage of leading families, like the Pynchons, the Stoddards, the Williamses, the Porters, and the Partridges, promoted certain joiners over others and established set views regarding the fashion and the function of objects in Hampshire County. The family ties of workmen further institutionalized methods of joinery and styles of carving because apprentices tended to learn their trades locally from relatives. With the approval of leadership and family, a covenant of recognized workmanship evolved in a conservative society quietly making a living in traditional ways. A decorative motif or a sequence of tasks in joining a chest became visual extensions of other unseen segments of culture.

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Familiarity bred security in western Massachusetts. The recognition and acceptance of these designs and methods became badges of membership in local society. The tightly knit homogeneity documented by John Pynchon1s ledgers and by travel accounts is also manifested in several dozen joined chests made before 1730 in the Connecticut Valley of Massachusetts.

NOTES:

1. Robert Blair St. George, The Wrought Covenant: Source Material for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England, 1620-1700 (Brockton, Massachusetts: The Brockton Art Center, 1979), pp. 18-19. 2. Stephen Innes, "Land Tenancy and Social Order in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1652-1702," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 35, no. 1 (January 1978): 54-56. 3. Ledgers of John Pynchon, 6 vols., Springfield (1652- 1702) , Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, MA., 5:271. 4. Ledgers of John Pynchon, 5:527. 5. Robert Blair St. George, "Style and Structure in the Joinery of Dedham and Medfield, Massachusetts, 1635- 1685," Winterthur Portfolio 13: American Furniture and Its Makers, ed. Ian I.M. Quimby (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 5-9. 6. Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 2:264, 3:514-519, 521-522, 526-528, 530-532, 534-536; St. George, The Wrought Covenant, pp. 28-64. 7. Patricia E. Kane, "The Joiners of Seventeenth Century Hartford County," Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 35, no. 3 (July 1970): 70; Charles Henry Pope, A History of the Dorchester Pope Family, 1634- 1888 (Boston: 1888), p. 51. 8. The seventeen family shop traditions are: John Allis (1642-1691), Samuel Allis (1647-1691), Ichabod Allis (1675-1747), and SamUel Belden, Jr. (1657-c.1737) in Hatfield; Jonathan Bush (1650-1739) and Samuel Bush,

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Jr. (d. 1728) in Springfield, Enfield, and Westfield; Daniel Cooley, Sr. (1651-1727), Eliakim Cooley;(1649- 1711), Obadiah Cooley (1647-1690), and Joseph Cooley (1662-1740) in Springfield; Obadiah Dickinson (1641- 1698), Nehemiah Dickinson (c. 1644-1723), and Israel Dickinson (1691-1733) in Wethersfield,- CT. , and Hadley; Jonathan Graves, Sr. (d. 1678), Samuel Graves (1655- 1692), and Isaac Graves (d. 1740) in Hatfield; John King (1629-1703) , John King (d. 1744), Joseph King (1709-1742) and John King (1704-1745) in Northampton; Joseph Leonard (1644-1719), Joseph Leonard, Jr. (1680- 1737), and Samuel Leonard (d. 1745) in Springfield; Richard Montague (c. 1614-1681), Peter Montague (1651- 1725), and John Montague, Jr. (1681-1722) in Hadley; George Norton (1641-1696) and George Norton, Jr. (d. 1742) in Suffield; John Pease, Sr. (1629-1689), John Pease, Jr. (1654-1734), Jonathan Pease (1669— 1721) , John Pease, III (1678-1761) , and Joseph Pease (1692-1757) in Enfield; Samuel Porter, Sr. (d. 1689) , Eleazar Porter (wkg. 1738) , and Alexander Porter (d. 1748) in Hadley; John Roote (d. 1687), Jonathan Roote (1646-1677), Thomas Root (d. 1709), Samuel Root (d. 1711) , and Samuel Roote, 2d. (d. 1712) in Westfield and Northampton; Richard Sikes (d. 1676) , Increase Sikes (1644-1712), Victory Sikes (1649-1708), Nathaniel Sikes, Sr. (c. 1673-1727), and Jonathan Sikes (1675-1710) in Springfield and Suffield; Beniamin Sitton (d. 1734) and Christopher Sitton (d. 1729) in Enfield; Samuel Smith, Sr. (c. 1602-1680), Joseph Smith (wkg. 1687) , Ebenezer Smith (d. 1729) , Chileab Smith (d. 1733) , and Philip Smith (d. 1734) in Wethersfield, CT., Hadley, and Hatfield; John Stebbins (d. 1678/9), John Stebbins, Jr. (1647-1724), Thomas Stebbins (d. 1713) , Thomas Stebbins, Jr. (1648-1695) , Edward Stebbins (wkg. 16 78, 1705), and Benjamin Stebbins (wkg. 1705) in Springfield, Northampton, and Deerfield; and Daniel Warner (1677-1711) and Samuel Warner (1681-1756) of Hadley and Springfield. The above introductory listing of related joiners and turners also includes relatives who worked as carpenters, coopers, and wheelwrights. Other important woodworkers who operated large shops, but are not known to have worked regularly with close family members are: Nehemiah Allyn (d. 1684) of Windsor, CT., and Northampton; Nathaniel Bancroft, Sr. (d. 1724) of Westfield; Thomas Barber (wkg. 1648-1670) of Springfield; Benjamin Barrett (d. 1690) of Hatfield and Deerfield; Fearnot Burlisson (1679-1732) of Suffield; William Clark, Sr. (1609-1690) of Hartford in Springfield; Aaron Cooke (wkg. 1669) of Springfield; Thomas Cooper (c. 1617-1675) of Springfield; Jonathan

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Forman (d. 1684) of Enfield; William Gaylord (1651- 1680) of Hadley; John Gilbert (1626-1690) of Northampton and Springfield; Isaac Gleason (1654-1698) of Enfield and Springfield; Benjamin Hastings (d. 1711) of Hatfield; John Hawks, Jr. (1643-after 1727) of Hadley, Hatfield, and Deerfield; Barnabas Hinsdale, Jr. (1668-1725) of Hatfield and Deerfield; John Lamb (wkg. 1651-1690) of Springfield; Benjamin Loomis (c. 1679-1734) of Westfield; Edmund Marshall (d. 1731) of Suffield; Samuel Miller (d. 1713) of Springfield; Timothy Nash (1626-1699) of Hadley; Joseph Parsons, Jr. (c. 1647-1729); John Pope, Sr. or Jr. (c. 1625-1683 or 1702) of Springfield and possibly Suffield; John Russell (1595-1680) of Hadley; John Wells, Sr. (c. 1628-1692) of Hatfield; Jacob Wheeler (wkg. 1726- 1728) of Suffield), Azariah Wright (d. 1747) of Suffield, and Joseph Younglove (wkg. 1728) of Suffield. Some of these men also lived and worked outside of Hampshire County during their careers. 9. Victor Chinnery, Oak Furniture: The British Tradition (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Baron Publishing, 1979), pp. 467-493; Anthony Wells-Cole, Oak Furniture from Yorkshire (Leeds, Yorkshire, England: 1971), pp. 5-52; Anthony Wells-Cole, Oak Furniture from Lancashire and the Lake District (Leeds, Yorkshire, England: 1973), pp. 5-29; John T. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 97-103. 10. Joseph H. Smith, ed., Colonial Justice in Western Massachusetts (1639-1702): The Pynchon Court Record (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 34-36; Henry M. Burt, The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736, 2 vols. (Springfield: 1898), 2:611. 11. Remembering that a craftsman did not necessarily learn his trade from a relative, the origins of the following first-generation woodworkers in Hampshire County are known: Richard Montague, a carpenter in Hadley, was born about 1614 at Burnham Parish, Buckinghamshire; John Root, a carpenter in Westfield, was probably born at Badby, Leicestershire; John Russell, a glazier and joiner in Hadley, was born at Cretingham (unidentified) in 1595; Samuel Smith, Sr., a joiner in Hadley, was born about 1602 at Ipswich, Suffolk; and Samuel Porter, a joiner and merchant in Hadley, was born at Felsted, Essex. The following emigrants had sons who became joiners or turners in Hampshire County: Hugh Wells, father of John, Sr., of Hatfield, was born in Essex; Samuel Allyn, father

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of Nehemiah of Northampton, was born about 1588 at Braintree, Essex; Samuel Belden, Sr., may have been born about 1625 at Kippax, Yorkshire, or in Staffordshire; Nathaniel Dickinson, father of Obadiah and Nehemiah of Wethersfield and Hadley, was born about 1600 at Ely, Cambridgeshire; William Gaylord, grandfather of William of Hadley, came from Devonshire; Joseph Loomis, grandfather of Benjamin of Westfield, was born about 1590 at Braintree, Essex; John Pope, father of John of Springfield, probably came from Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, or Devonshire; and John Strong, father of Thomas of Northampton who may have been a carpenter, was born in 1605 at Taunton, Somersetshire. 12. Pope, Pope Family, pp. 44, 51-52, 64-65, 73, 75. 13. Stephen Innes, Labor in a New Land; Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 9-10, 58, 86, 109, 143-144. 14. Ledger, John Pynchon, 3:283. 15. Ledger, John Pynchon, 5:263. The reference to sawn oak is interesting. There is little evidence of mill sawn oak in Hampshire County joinery. 16. Ledger, John Pynchon III, Springfield (1703-1709), Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT., pp. 23, 49. John Pynchon III was the grandson of John Pynchon and the great-grandson of William Pynchon. The ledger was formerly believed to have belonged to Samuel Taylor of Westfield. The author wishes to thank Robert F. Trent for bringing the account book to his attention. See Walter L. Powell, "A Question of Accounts: Samuel Taylor or John Pynchon 3rd," Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 45, no. 4 (October 1980): 123-126. 17. George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Deerfield: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1895), 2:75. 18. Inventory of Benjamin Barrett, Deerfield, 1690. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 2 (1678-1716), p. 61. 19. For example, Inventory of Samuel Bartlet, Northampton, 1712. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 3 (1692- 1713), pp. 292-293. 20. William N. Hosley, Jr., and Philip Zea, "Decorated Board Chests of the Connecticut River Valley," Antiques, 119, no. 5 (May 1981): 1146-1151.

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The joined furniture made in western Massachusetts was constructed of local woods. Some species no longer grow there in abundance, but all are recorded by the written record or by an afternoon walk. Red and white oak (Quercus rubra and QuerCus alba), maple (Acer saccharum) , beech (Fagus grandifolia) , sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) , cherry (Prunus serotina) in a diminished form, and white pine (Pinus strobus) are all seen along the road today. A blight destroyed the chestnut tree (Castanea deutata) before the First World War. When Obadiah Abbee died at Enfield in 1734, however, he owned "the Chestnut Swamp Lot." Applied moldings on some chests made in the Springfield area are often white cedar (Chamaecyparis thyoides), which is still found in isolated stands on the Holyoke Range south of Northampton. When William Nichols died at Brimfield, east of Springfield, in 1741, he owned "a lot in the Cedar Swamp.The inlay on at least five chests from Springfield is made of the contrasting heartwood and sapwood of walnut (Juglans nigra) whose cousin, butternut or white Walnut (Juglans cinerea), is the only survivor in New England today (see Catalogue 3 Entry 1). In 1729, Jonathan Alvard of Northampton owned 4 land "In that part of the Meadow, called Walnut Trees." Hard, yellow pine was v/idely used as a secondary wood in Hampshire County joined furniture. Two varieties of "southern" pine grow in New England: pitch pine (Pinus rigida) and jack pine (PinuS banksiana). Neither variety grows in great stands in the Northeast any longer, but when Joseph Ingersole died at Westfield in 1704, his estate

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5 included "Turpentine Trees."

These woods were rived or mill sawn and joined in a consistent manner that varied slightly from one shop tradition to the next in Hampshire County. The joined chests made in the region reveal a few common characteristics. Most carved examples are made of red oak (Quercus rubra) as the primary wood and pitch pine (Pinus riqida) as the secondary wood. The panels are framed by mortised and tenoned rails and stiles (fig. 5). The bottom of the chest is usually composed of three pine boards, their grain running parallel to the sides, that are beveled on the front edge of their undersides and framed into a groove along the inside surface of the medial front rail (fig. 6). They are nailed to the underside of the rear medial rail. A rough, mill-sawn, pine board is nailed to the backs of the two rear posts, over the ends of the bottom boards or sometimes beneath them to. provide additional support (fig. 7). To achieve a stronger, tighter bottom, the joiner used a rabbet plane on the edges of the boards to make a lap joint (fig. 8).

The drawer was constructed by running a rabbet plane along the bottom, rear edge of the drawer facade; by dovetailing each side to the facade with a single dovetail and sometimes reinforcing it with a nail (the dovetail may occur above the groove in each side that supports the drawer, or the groove may intersect the dovetail); by nailing the back of the drawer to each end of the sides with four rose-head nails; and by nailing the bottom board(s), which is (are) parallel to the facade, to the bottom edges of all four members. The drawer bottom is often composed of two boards, the narrow one to the rear, which are interlocked with the lap joint described above (fig. 9). This practice minimized the effect of the

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Fig. 5. Joined Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "WA", Northern Hampshire County, circa 1700. Oak, yellow pine, and white pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 44" (111.8 cm.) D: 19%" (49.5 cm.). Gift of Aaron Arms, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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Fig. 6. Underside of Joined Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "WA", Northern Hampshire County, circa 1700. Oak, yellow pine, and white pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 44" (111.8 cm.) D: 19V' (49.5 cm.). Gift of Aaron Arms, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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Fig. 7. Back of Joined Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700. Red oak and yellow pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 47%" (120 cm.) D: 20%" (52.1 cm.). Gift of Chester Graves Crafts, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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Fig. 8. Joint of the Bottom Boards at the Back of Joined Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "AA", Probably Hatfield Area, 1685-1710. Oak and yellow pine (no microanalysis); H: 35%" (89.5 cm.) W: 50" (127 cm.) D: 20 1/8" (51.1 cm.). Gift of Moses S. Ward, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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Fig. 9. Drawers of Joined Chest with Three Drawers, Inscribed "SH", Northern Hampshire County, 1700-1720. Oak and white pine (no microanalysis); H: 4 5V (115.6 cm.) W: 44V (113.0 cm.) D: 1 8 V (47 era.) . Gift of George Sheldon, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. The chest descended in the Hawks and Wells families of Deerfield.

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Fig. 10. Drawer Support of Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "WA", Northern Hampshire County, circa 1700. Oak, yellow pine, and white pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 44" (111.8 cm.) D: 1 9 V (49.5 cm.). Gift of Aaron Arms, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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t ^ C ^ , ® ! \ • ) 1 t M / O t*|

Fig. 11. Two Panels of Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700. Red oak and yellow pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 4 7 V (120 cm.) D: 2 0 V (52.1 cm.). Gift of Chester Graves Crafts, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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Fig. 12. Side of Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700. Red oak and yellow pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 4 7 V (120 cm.) D: 2 0 V (52.1 cm.). Gift of Chester Graves Crafts, Pocumtuck. Valley Memorial Association.

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Fig. 13. Interior Side Panel of Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700. Red oak and yellow pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 47%" (120 cm.) D: 20%" (52.1 cm.). Gift of Chester Graves Crafts, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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ispistag

Fig. 14. Detail of Right Post of Chest with Drawer, Inscribed "RA", Hatfield or Springfield Areas, circa 1700. Red oak and yellow pine (no microanalysis); H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W : 4 7 V (120 cm.) D: 2032" (52.1 cm.). Gift of Chester Graves Crafts, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association.

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unavoidable shrinkage and splitting of a single board and was not an attempt to conserve wood. The drawer operates on flat, oak or yellow pine supports that are nailed into shallow mortises in the interior edges of the front and rear posts and that fit into a groove cut in each drawer side (fig. 10). The ends of the drawer facade are beveled to form a lip that corresponds to the bevel along the inside edges of the front posts and that serves as a drawer stop.

The edges of the rails and stiles are relieved around the panels by beveling their inner edges and by retaining the outer shoulder at the ends of those members with tenons at a forty-five degree (45°) angle to coincide with the chamfered edges on the members with mortises (fig. 11). Applied moldings are rarely found on Hampshire County joined furniture. The framing members on the sides of the chest are also often relieved around the panels and are decorated with a simple, three-groove, incised molding (fig. 12). Although the exterior surfaces of the panels are always flat, their interior surfaces are beveled. Inside the chest, the corners of the riven, pie-shaped posts are cut away, making them roughly pentagonal (fig. 13). A groove is usually cut along the left-hand edge of each post, visible from the top, to facilitate framing the chest. The framing members, visible panels, and drawer sides and fronts were usually made of riven oak. Beech, maple, and chestnut were used in later chests. The front and back of the chest were assembled first. The two front posts were joined by the base and medial rails. The muntins were mortised and tenoned into the top of the medial rail, and the three beveled panels were driven into place. ' Once the top rail was framed over them, and all

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of the joints were pinned, the facade was completed. The back of the chest, with its single framed panel, was joined in a similar manner.

On many chests, it appears that the carving was done after the facade was assembled because the heads of the pins are trimmed away, partly or wholly, to coincide with the design (fig. 14). Of course, the heads of the pins could have been dressed after assembly as well. On other chests, the evidence is less clear. Sometimes paint is visible where two members are joined, which suggests that the paint and perhaps the carving were applied before assembly. This treatment appears more consistently on chests where the flower motif is confined within an incised border on each member (see Catalogue Entries 4 and 5). In either case, drawer facades and panels were carved separately; two holes were drilled in opposite corners of the panels of the "RA" chest to temporarily secure them to the bench while carving (see figure 11 and Catalogue Entry 5). Certainly, joiners did not carve completely framed chests because the unit was awkward to maneuver and because the risk of marring the facade of a finished chest g with a single slip of the gouge was too high.

Although the carved facades of Hampshire County chests appear complex, the repetitive motif was probably 7 first laid out with a rough template. The rails usually accommodate four tulip-and-leaf combinations with a central medallion. The muntins on either side of the central panel have one combination. The number of repeats on the posts corresponds with the number of drawers and the height of the chest. The carved combinations on the two flanking panels are usually larger and were laid out with a different template. The central panel with the initials often carries a different motif and usually appears to have

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been done freehand to accommodate the letters.

After the facade of the chest was carved, the front and back units were joined by the side rails and panels. The bottom of the receptacle and the pine lid with nailed oak or yellow pine cleats to retard warping were affixed to the chest. The top rail and lid were fitted with a metal lock and staple to secure the storage compartment, and the drawer was put into place. Most Hampshire County chests lack a till in the coffer section because of the presence of drawers for easy access to small items.

Systematic planning and assembly increased each joiner's efficiency. Both steps were learned through repetition during apprenticeship. Woodworking procedures became regulated and traditional; they required care, but not great additional thought to execute them. The efficient way became the "right" way to construct a product in shops of men making a living. Rooted in apprenticeship and patronage, shared experiences were framed into similar chests and tables. The regular methodology outlined above is repeated with some variation in dozens of examples of Hampshire County joinery. The common features of these joined chests are a document of cultural definition in western Massachusetts.

NOTES: 1. Inventory of Obadiah Abbe, Enfield, 1734. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 5 (1729-1738), p. 125a. 2. Inventory of William Nichols, Brimfield, 1741. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 6 (1739-1745), pp. llla-112. 3. Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent,.. New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols.. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 3:524-525. One must remember that the names applied to materials and objects can change over time.

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4. Inventory of Jonathan Alvard, Northampton, 1729. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 5 (1729-1738), p. 9. 5. Inventory of Joseph Ingersole, Westfield, 1704. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 2 (1678-rl716) , p. 172; see R. Bruce Hoadley, Understanding Wood; A Craftsman's Guide to Wood Technology (Newtown, Connecticut: The Taunton.Press, 1980).and Herbert L. Edlin, What Wood Is That? A Manual of wood Identification (1969; reprint ed., New York: The Viking Press, 1969). 6. David W. Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship (1968; reprint ed., New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), pp. 7-10. 7. Patricia E. Kane, "The Seventeenth-Century Furniture of the Connecticut Valley: The Hadley Chest Reappraised," Arts of the Anglo-American Community in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Ian M.G. Quimby (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), pp. 92, 96, 98-99, 104.

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Two centuries after leaving the joiner's shop, "Hadley" chests caught the fancy of antiquarians, who were drawn by the dark, medieval solidarity of the chests and by the teasing anonymity of the carved initials on them. The furniture was popularized initially by Henry Wood Erving, a Hartford collector who purchased the "RD" chest at Hadley in September 1883 and who called it his "Hadley chest."'*' Fifty-two years later, the Reverend Clair Franklin Luther, an Amherst minister, catalogued the 109 carved examples 2 then known to him and published The Hadley Chest in 1935. Relying heavily on published genealogies to identify the initials on chests, Luther applied Erving's advice that:

When...a piece of ancient furniture is found in the home of a family where it has remained, and in whose possession it has been for a number of generations, it is a fair presumption that the article has been in that place from the first, and should it be constructed of local material— of native woods,— it is also proper to assume that it was made in the near vicinity, and by a cabinetmaker or joiner of the neighborhood.3

While assumptions of ownership are dangerous without written documents to substantiate family traditions, the second part of Erving's advice is true. The material evidence in every object does betray its origins to the investigator who reads the language of artifacts. Consequently, the emphasis in the present study is to diminish the importance of genealogical traditions that cannot be documented and to allow the chests to speak for themselves. We can never know whether the parents of the

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young lady, whose initials we believe are carved on a given chest, actually admired and patronized a specific joiner, regardless of family ties. The chest, however, survives as a local product with built-in evidence about its origins.

A considerable amount of work has advanced o.ur understanding of joined furniture made in Hampshire County since Wallace Nutting described "Hadley" chests as "largely scratch-carved with Pig Tails, a Tasteless Decoration."^ In 1974, Patricia Kane greatly expanded Luther's methodology and published "The Seventeenth-Century Furniture 5 of the Connecticut Valley: The Hadley Chest Reappraised." She primarily studied the carving styles on the chests' facades and divided the furniture into six groups, plus variant and untraced chests, with corresponding sub-groups. While Kane's Groups 1, 2, and 4 are generally complete, examination and collation of the construction details and the carving on the chests in Groups 3, 5, and 6 force a reordering of the typology. The following catalogue of sixteen chests discusses the twenty subtypes of "Hadley" chests and traces the development of joined furniture in the shop traditions of western Massachusetts during the rebuilding period after King Philip's War.

NOTES:

1. Henry Wood Erving, "Random Recollections of an Early Collector," The Twenty-fifth Anniversary Meeting of the Walpole Society (Walpole Society: 1935), p. 40. 2. Clair Franklin Luther, The Hadley Chest (Hartford: The Case, Lockwood, and Brainard Company, 1935). 3. Henry Wood Erving, "The Connecticut Chest," Old-Time New England, 12, no. 1 (July 1921) : 15. 4. Wallace Nutting, Furniture Treasury (1928; reprint ed., New York: The Macmillan Company, 1948), fig. 64.

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5. Patricia E. Kane, "The Seventeenth-Century Furniture of the Connecticut Valley: The Hadley Chest Reappraised," Arts.of the Anglo-AmeriOan Community in the Seventeenth Century, eld. Ian I.M. Quimby (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975).

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1. JOINED CHEST WITH DRAWER/ INSCRIBED "PK/1699", SPRINGFIELD AREA, CIRCA 1699.

OAK, MAPLE, WALNUT, AND YELLOW PINE (by microanalysis) H: 32" (81.3 cm.) W: 53V' (135.3 cm.) D: 18 3/4" (47.6 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 1; replaced lid; owned by William Z. Hulbert of Middletown, Connecticut, about 1891. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON. BEQUEST OF CHARLES HITCHCOCK TYLER.

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The "PK" chest represents an atypical group of at least six chests and four boxes with naturalistic carving, crescent-shaped highlights, applied balusters and moldings, and inlaid bands of walnut. The joinery is also atypical of western Massachusetts. The chest has square posts, two fully framed, horizontal back panels; a single bottom board in the storage compartment that is framed parallel to the facade; and no drawer lips or bottom rail. These details, however, are found on contemporary furniture; the combination of carving, applied balusters, a framed lower back panel, and no drawer lips characterizes Hartford County joinery.1 A Hampshire County sub-group decorated with applied geometric moldings and blocks in also known 2 (Kane Group 6).

Despite the atypicality of these chests, the characteristic tulip-and-leaf motif associated with western Massachusetts appears on the top rail, central panel, and drawer facade of the "PK" chest. Similarly, like most so-called "Hadley" chests, the drawer facade is attached to the sides with a single dovetail reminiscent of London-style joinery manifest by the Mason-Messenger shops in Boston and by the Russell-Gibbons shops in New Haven a 3 generation earlier. The more sculptural, three-dimensional carving and the thinly riven oak boards that compose the sides of the boxes are also suggestive of English joinery. There is a strong temptation to attribute this work to a recent emigrant, but these chests are a New England hybrid of joinery and decorative concepts that substantiate the second-generation phenomenon. They are dated between 1698 and 1701, well into the second and third generations after settlement, and may have been made simultaneously with other types of "Hadley" chests (see Catalogue Entry 2).

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The careful carving, turnery, inlay,, and assembly of the "PK" chest made it expensive, like all joined furniture. Only a few families close to the Pynchon hearth in Springfield could afford such decorative furniture. Although no firm histories of ownership are intact, circumstantial evidence points to the Springfield area for the site of the shop where these chests were made. Combining initials with meaningful dates, it is coincidental that a young woman named Prudence Kellogg from Hadley married Abraham Merrill in 1699 and that several of her 4 relatives lived in Westfield. It is also coincidental that the two-drawer example inscribed "NDM/1700" (Greenwich, CT., Historical Society) may have been made for Nathaniel and Margaret (Pynchon) Downing, a granddaughter of John, 5 who married about the year 1700 (see figure 4). And it is coincidental that the chest inscribed "HB/March 1701" (the date may have been added later) may have been made for Hannah, a daughter of Henry Burt of Springfield, who was g born on March 14, 1701. The chest has similar panels to the "PK" chest, but has overall vine carving related to the chests discussed under Catalogue Entry 2. Such forays into genealogical fantasy, which led Luther to attribute this group to Hartford, are dangerous research crutches and must be treated as secondary proof. Nevertheless, the physical evidence of high quality and varied skills in the "PK" chest strongly suggests manufacture in the region's principal commercial town, Springfield.

No joiner stands out as an obvious candidate for the maker of the "PK" chest. One of Springfield's leading joiners was John Pope, who was paid for constructing the pulpit and interior woodwork of the meeting house in 1677 (see pp. 37, 49). However, Pope was probably in his 7 mid-seventies when the "PK" chest was made. John Pease, Jr. (1654-1734), of Enfield and George Norton, Jr. (1641—

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1696) , of Suffield were also the type of tradesmen whose backgrounds would have equipped them for fine joinery. Pease was apprenticed to John Symonds (c. 1590-1671) in O Salem, Massachusetts, and moved to Enfield about 1681. Chests attributed to the Symonds1 shop show a similar treatment of heavy ebonized moldings, applied turnery and geometric blocks, and walnut. Symonds' inventory lists a lathe and proves that turning was done in his shop. The business was taken over by his son, James (1633-1714), with 9 whom Pease finished his term. Similarly, Norton was probably trained by his father in Ipswich before moving to Suffield in 1674; he worked on the Springfield meeting house four years later. Although Norton died in 1696, three years before the "PK" chest was made, he too may have influenced the introduction of the carved, geometric style to Hampshire County.^ The carved lozenges with geometric strapwork on the outside panels of the "PK" chest do bear some resemblance to the carving on joined furniture made in the Searle-Dennis shops in Ipswich a generation earlier.^ Another candidate, for geographical reasons, is John Warner (bpt. 164 9-1724), who was also born in Ipswich and lived in Hadley (1669) and Suffield (1672) before settling in 12 Springfield in 1676 where he operated a sawmill.

Although neither Pope, Pease, Norton, nor Warner is proven to have made the "PK" chest, this small group of furniture represents the best joinery made in Hampshire County. Whoever the joiner of this furniture was, he worked at a high professional level in a hybrid style that combined both naturalistic and geometric carving, a variety of molding planes, and access to the skills of an accomplished turner. The small, concentrated group of furniture suggests the workmanship of a man who applied his trade for a short period of time in Hampshire County and whose

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background put him in touch with a variety of first- and second-generation joinery traditions.

NOTES:

1. Patricia E. Kane, "The Joiners of Seventeenth Century Hartford County," The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 35, no. 3 (July 1970): 74-77; Houghton Bulkeley, "A Discovery on the Connecticut.Chest," The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 23, no. 1 (January 1958): 17-19. 2. At least three chests with tulip-and-leaf carving and applied moldings and blocks are extant. An important example with traces of original paint is now in the collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Kane Group 6 should be considered a subtype of Kane Group 1. 3. Robert F. Trent, "New England Joinery and Turning before 1700," New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts), 3:503, 505, 522-526. 4. Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), Part II, "Genealogies," p. 81. 5. Thomas B. Warren, "Springfield Families," 3 vols. (Unpublished typescript on file at the New England Historic-Genealogical Society, Boston), 1:251-252; Henry M. Burt, The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736, 2 vols. (Springfield: 1898), 2:629. 6. Warren, "Springfield Families," 1:108. 7. Charles Henry Pope, A History of the Dorchester Pope Family, 1634-1888 (Boston: 188 8), pT 51. 8. Benno M. Forman, "The Seventeenth-Century Case Furniture of Essex County, Massachusetts, and Its Makers" (M.A. thesis, University of Delaware, 1968), pp. 30, 32, 42-46. 9. Inventory of John Symonds, Salem, 1671. Essex County Probate Records, 2:249. Registry of Probate, Essex County Courthouse, Salem, MA. 10. Inventory of George Norton, Suffield, 1696. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 3 (1692-1713), p. 24.

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11. Patricia E. Kane, "The Seventeenth-Century Furniture of the Connecticut Valley: The Hadley Chest Reappraised," Arts of the Anglo-American Community in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Ian I.M. Quimby (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975), pp. 81, 84, 86-87. 12. Frederick C. Warner, "The Ancestry of Samuel, Freda, and John Warner" (unpublished typescript on file at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, MA.), p. W-2; Burt, Springfield, 2:652; Ledger, John Pynchon III, Springfield (1703-1709), Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT., p. 103. The ledger records "All ye above Sd Sum were in Part pay for ye mill sold John Warner."

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2. JOINED CHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS, INSCRIBED "AA", PROBABLY HATFIELD AREA, 1685-1710.

- * •; ;r;

OAK AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 38 1/8" (96.8 cm.) W: 48 3/8" (123.9 cm.) D: 18 5/8" (47.3 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 2; gray paint is a later addition. CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART. GIFT. OF THE JOHN HUNTINGTON ART AND POLYTECHNIC TRUST.

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The' "AA" chest represents a group of at least eight heavily constructed chests. Four of the chests have the meandering vine and flattened tulip illustrated here; four more chests have similar panels but incised moldings rather than trailing vines on their structural members. All of the chests have an initial carved within the lozenge on each flanking panel.

The construction and decoration of the "AA" chest illustrate a different kind of hybridization than witnessed by the "PK" chest (see Catalogue Entry 1). The joiner borrowed details from other shop traditions in the Connecticut Valley rather than synthesizing an urbane level of joinery, turnery, and carving techniques with the tulip-and-leaf motif characteristic of Hampshire County. The "AA" chest reflects elements of the "PK" chest and of chests attributed to a shop in Wethersfield, Connecticut, 1 presumably operated by Peter Blin. Although the "AA" chest is heavier, lacks applied work, and in fact may be earlier than the dated Springfield chests, the configuration of the central panel, with rounded stems, and the lozenge carved in the outer panels are reminiscent of the "PK" chest. Similarly, the grooves in the sides of the posts that receive the panels are not visible at the tops of the posts in either chest. Like some "sunflower" chests from Hartford County, trailing vines cover the facade of the "AA" chest, no dovetail is used in the drawer construction (the parts are simply rabbeted and nailed), and the front edge of the drawer bottom is beveled and fits into a groove in the back of the facade. Like most "Hadley" chests, the lower back board is simply nailed to the rear posts rather than carefully framed in place, as on the Springfield and Hartford County examples. The posts of the "AA" chest are roughly pentagonal in the usual manner.

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The strong visual and technological relationships to. Hartford County joinery: and the nod to Springfield practices in the panel designs suggest the workmanship of someone who moved up the Connecticut Valley. Many men may ■ . 3 have influenced decorative selection m Hampshire County. Lacking documentation, however, an attribution for the "AA" chest is rash. The compounded histories of this group of chests suggest origins north of Springfield rather than a parallel shop tradition in Springfield itself. Coincidentally, six of the eight chests in the group have the last initial "A". The first initials do correspond to several females in the families of John and Ichabod Allis, 4 father and son, of Hatfield. Although the heaviness of these chests makes them appear early, the hybridization of Springfield and Wethersfield features indicates that they were built roughly contemporary with the dated Springfield examples discussed in Catalogue Entry 1.

NOTES:

1. Houghton Bulkeley, Contributions to Connecticut Cabinet Making (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1967), pp. 24-27; Patricia E. Kane, "The Joiners of Seventeenth Century Hartford County," The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin, 35, no. 3 (July 1970): 74-77. 2. Kane, "Joiners," cover; Dean A. Fales, Jr., The Furniture of Historic Deerfield (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1976) , p. 167; John T. Kirk, Connecticut Furniture: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967), pp. 11-14. 3. Joiners whose careers match the physical evidence of Hartford County and Springfield area characteristics in the "AA" chest include John Allis who supervised the construction of the Springfield meeting house in 1678 and who died at Hatfield in 1691; Obadiah and Nehemiah Dickinson who grew up in Wethersfield and who moved to Hadley in 1659 where Nehemiah died in 1723 (Obadiah returned to Wethersfield in 1678) ; John Gilbert, joiner and glazier, who worked in Windsor, Hartford, Springfield, and Northampton during his career and who

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died in 1690; Richard Montague who was born in Burnham Parish, Buckinghamshire, about 1614 and who was living in Wethersfield by 1651 and in Hadley by 1659 where he died in 1681; Timothy Nash,.who was born about 1626, emigrated to New Haven with his parents and moved to Hadley by 1663 where he died in 1699; Samuel Porter from Felsted, Essex, whose parents settled in Windsor, Connecticut, and who died at Hadley in 1689; John Russell, glazier and joiner, who was born in England about 1595, settled in Wethersfield in 1649 and moved to Hadley where he died in 1680; and Samuel Smith, who was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, settled in Wethersfield in 1635 and moved to Hadley in 1659 where he died in 1680. Notably, many of these men probably had died by the time that the "AA" chest was made, but one of them may have trained the joiner who worked in this style in the Hatfield-Hadley area. See Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), Part II, "Genealogies," pp. 5-6, 33-34, 95, 101, 111-112, 117, 123; Kane, "Joiners," pp. 70, 73, 77. 4. Clair Franklin Luther attributed the group of chests represented by the "AA" chest to the Allis family of Hatfield. See Clair Franklin Luther, The Hadley Chest (Hartford: The Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1935) , pp. 22-31.

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3. JOINED CHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS, INSCRIBED "MS", PROBABLY HADLEY AREA, 1710-1725.

MAPLE AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 45 1/8" (119.7 cm.) W: 43V' (110.5 cm.) D: 19 3/4" (50.2 cm) NOTES: Kane Group 2. WILLIAM A. FARNSWORTH LIBRARY AND ART MUSEUM. GIFT OF ANNA A. KLOSS.

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Strong shop traditions, illustrated here by the "MS" chest and its antecedent, the "AA" chest (see Catalogue Entry 2), assured the retention of specific decorative and constructional details from one generation to the next in Hampshire County joinery. The later "MS" chest is lightly constructed of maple and yellow pine with turned feet to imitate the lines of contemporary cabinetwork made of dovetailed boards. It relates to the "MD" chest (Yale University) and to a joined table with drawer in a private collection.^ Nevertheless, the carving style and the configuration of the trailing vine is virtually the same on the "MS" and "AA" chests. The drawer construction, with two nails rather than a dovetail holding each side to the facade and with a beveled bottom board fitting into a groove in the back of the facade, shows the same relationship to Hartford County joinery as the "AA" chest. Similarly, the design of the panels and the turned feet are reminiscent of the "PK" chest from Springfield (see Catalogue Entry 1).

The history of the "MS" chest may document the relationship between the parallel Springfield and Hatfield/ Hadley shop traditions. As Marius Peladeau noted, the chest may have been made for Mary Sheldon (b. 1702 or 1708) 2 of Hadley. However, further inquiry reveals that Mary's mother, Mary Warner, had two double first cousins, Daniel (1677-1711) and Samuel Warner (1681-1756), who operated 3 large shops m Hadley and Springfield respectively. Furthermore, Mary Warner's step-mother, Martha Boltwood, who raised her, also counted the sawyer, John Warner (c. 1643-1724) of Hadley and Springfield, as a brother-in- 4 law (see Catalogue Entry 1). As addling as family networks are to follow, the travels of related joiners, like the Warner brothers, explain the strong similarities between products of shop traditions in Hampshire County.

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NOTES:

1. John T. Kirk, Connecticut Furniture; Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967), p. 15; Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 2:306-307. 2. Marius Peladeau, "A Hadley Chest Reconsidered," Antiques, 117, no. 5 (May 1980): 1084-1086. 3. Inventory of Daniel Warner, Hadley, 1712. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 3 (1692-1713), pp. 265- 266; Inventory of Samuel Warner, Springfield, 1756. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 9 (1758-1761), p . 25. 4. Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), Part II, "Genealogies," pp. 13, 146-147,

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4. JOINED CHEST WITH DRAWER, INSCRIBED "PW", POSSIBLY SPRINGFIELD. AREA, CIRCA 1700.

•r+l «%*. ■ «j*v -» T* ''• » iwfflP 0 i ’ « i \ n * 1 * , i v V 4 '•

WHITE OAK, BEECH, AND YELLOW PINE (by microanalysis) H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 4 9 V (125.7 cm.) D: 193s". (48.9 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 5a; inscribed in the nineteenth century: "Ralph Meacham/Ashtabula/Ohib"; retains original paint. H.F. DUPONT WINTERTHUR MUSEUM.

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The "PW" chest is associated with the Warner family and with Springfield. Like the "PK" chest from Springfield, the leaves on the central panel are highlighted with gouged crescents, and the groove in each drawer side intersects a single, large dovetail (see Catalogue Entry 1). Like the "AA" and "MS" chests from northern Hampshire County, the drawer bottom of the "PW" chest is beveled on its front edge and fits in a groove along the lower, rear edge of the drawer facade (see Catalogue Entries 2,3).

The carving style of the "PW" chest is flat and typical of most "Hadley" chests. The tulip-and-leaf motif is contained within the incised borders around each member of the facade. This treatment is more Mannerist in feeling than the superimposition of the carving over contiguous members that is seen on other chests (see Catalogue Entry 10).^ The contrasting red and black paints also emphasize the structural organization and the artificiality of the chest. Although similar in many ways to other examples, the carving style of the "PW" chest reflects two subtly different techniques. The layout of the motif on the panels is particularly broad, and the gouge marks were applied only to the central panel. The "PW" chest may represent the work of a small or short-lived shop in southern Hampshire County. The inscription "Ralph Meacham/Ashtabula/Ohio" is visible in black paint on the back of the chest and documents use as a shipping crate when the family went west. Meacham was born in East Hartland, Connecticut, in 1797 and died at West Mecca, Indiana, in 1877. The initials on the central panel may denote Meacham's great-great grandmother, Priscilla Warner, who was born in Springfield in 1677 and who married Edward Bement in 1703. Priscilla's father was John Warner, who was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, about 164 3. He settled at Hadley in 1669

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and married Lydia, daughter of Robert Boltwood who operated the town's first sawmill, in 1674. Although unrelated by blood, Warner became.the in-law of the joiners Daniel (1677- 1711) and Samuel Warner (1681-1756) of Hadley and Springfield respectively. . John Warner moved to Suffield in 1672 under a contract with John Pynchon to establish a sawmill; Warner moved to Springfield in 1676. Remembered principally as a sawyer, Warner may have influenced his young in-law, Samuel, to move to Springfield from Northfield by 1703.2

Whoever made the "PW" chest, its history in the Meacham family and its relationship in carving style to a box initialed "AB" (Connecticut Historical Society) substantiate probable origins in the Springfield area. Both objects have the same flat style of carving with broad, poorly drawn leaves and gouge highlights. Like the "PW" chest, the box is made of beech, oak, and pine. According to family history, the box was made for Abigail Ball (1683-1760) who married Moses Parsons at Springfield in 1710. The couple moved to Durham, Connecticut, where 3 the box remained for generations. The chest and the box were probably made in the same shop in southern Hampshire County.

NOTES: 1. Robert F. Trent, "The Concept of Mannerism," New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 3:368-379. 2. I.M. Strowbridge, "Meacham Genealogy" (Unpublished manuscript on file at the Connecticut Historical Society); J. Granville Leach, "Chronicle of the Bement Family in America for Clarence Sweet Bement" (Unpublished manuscript on file at the Connecticut Historical Society); Mrs.. Ruth Harlow to Benno Forman, 1970 January 21, on file at the H.F. duPont Winterthur Museum; Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including

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the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R~. Huntting and Company, 1905), p. 148; J. Alfred Warner, Register of the Ancestors of Samuel Warner and His Descendants (Brooklyn: 1924), pp. 38-42; Lucien Warner, The Descendants of AndieW Warner (New Haven: 1919), pp. 44-47, 80-82; Ledger, John Pynchon III, Springfield (1703-1709), Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT. , pp. 104-105. The ledger entry records Samuel Warner as "ye Joiner." The author is grateful to Robert Trent for bringing the ledger to his attention. 3. Registrar's Files, 1972.13.0, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT. The author wishes to thank Abbott Lowell Cummings for bringing the box and its history to his attention.

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5. JOINED CHEST WITH DRAWER, INSCRIBED "RA", HATFIELD OR SPRINGFIELD AREAS, CIRCA 1700.

niSTt'ti iii. T U--. asxth?*

RED OAK AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 34" (86.4 cm.) W: 4 7 V (120 cm.) D: 2 0 V (52.1 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 5c; retains original paint. POCUMTUCK VALLEY MEMORIAL ASSOCIATION. GIFT OF CHESTER GRAVES CRAFTS.

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The similarities and differences of the "RA" chest and the "PW" chest bear mute testimony to the parallel family networks and shop traditions of the tradesmen who hybridized English joinery in western Massachusetts (see Catalogue Entry 4). The. style of the carving on the two chests is somewhat similar, but their construction, varies dramatically. The tulip-and-leaf motif is contained within the incised borders of each member of the facades of both objects, but the joiner of the "RA" chest used his gouge to highlight the stylized foliage over its entire front rather than simply over the central panel. The red and black paints were applied to the same members of both chests. The "RA" chest was painted before assembly but after the parts were carved; holes in the opposite corners of the panels show that they were affixed to the bench for carving. Although the makers of both chests used an elongated "E" to fill the uncarved voids around the repeated motif, the designs on the flanking panels and the bottom rails of both chests are different, and the uppermost leaf on each post of the "PW” chest points inward while the paired leaves on the "RA" chest point outward. Construction techniques also differ between the two chests.Each drawer side of the "RA" chest is joined to the facade with a small dovetail above the groove that supports the drawer; on the "PW" chest, the groove intersects the dovetail. The lip at each end of the drawer facade is more pronounced on the "RA" chest, and the drawer bottom simply butts against a rabbet cut along the lower edge of the drawer front. On the "PW" chest, the bottom board is beveled at the front and fits in a groove.

The visual similarity and technological dissimilarity between the "RA" and "PW" chests illustrate the popularity of joined furniture with stylized vine carving in Hampshire County towns and the demand placed

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upon several shops to satisfy consumer preference. Our search is for the identities of joiners who were probably familiar with one another's work, but whose backgrounds may have afforded different training and constructional preferences. Although the maker of the "RA" chest is undocumented, the object was an heirloom in the Graves family of Hatfield. The donor of the chest to Memorial Hall in Deerfield was descended from four branches of the Graves family. (Incredibly, his mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and great-great grandmother were all Graveses.) One of the donor's great-great grandfathers was Nathaniel Graves of Hatfield who married Rebecca, daughter of the joiner John Allis, in 1702. However, the "RA" chest is quite unlike the group of chests represented by the "AA" chest, which has traditionally been associated with the Allis shop (see Catalogue Entry 2). Notably, another joiner is documented in the Graves family. Nathaniel's brother, Isaac Graves (c. 1655-1740), operated a large shop in Hatfield.'*' His probate inventory includes a full listing of joiner's tools and suggests that Graves also made furniture; he owned a keyhole saw appraised at one shilling.2

NOTES:

1. Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), Part II, "Genealogies," pp. 59-60. Benjamin Barrett (d. 1690) , a joiner in Hatfield and Deerfield, was also an in-law of the Graves family. 2. Inventory of Isaac Graves, Hatfield, 1740. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 6 (1739-1745),. p. 89.

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6. JOINED CHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS, INSCRIBED "HH", HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, 1700-1720.

OAK AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 41 578" (105.7 cm.) W: 46V' (118.1 cm.) D: 17" (43.2 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 5a; the initials "HH" may have been added later; the chest was purchased from a Mr. Stow in Conway, Massachusetts, in 1887; it was owned by Mrs. William D. Rand of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1934. PRIVATE COLLECTION.

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The "HH" chest represents a small group of furniture that, like the "AA" and "MS" chests, spans two generations and that reveals familiarity with Hartford County and Springfield area joinery (see Catalogue Entries 2,3). Unfortunately, the chests lack reliable histories. The "HH" chest is characterized by facing tulips and leaves on the central panel that preclude the usual placement of the initials and that are somewhat reminiscent of the panels on "sunflower" chests from the Wethersfield area. The construction of the early chests in this tradition is generally poor; the scrolls, scallops, and occasional pinwheels that fill the voids around the repeated motif are badly drawn. Like the other varied examples in Kane's Group 5, the structural members of the chest are outlined with the incised borders that contain the carved motif. Similar to the "PK" chest from Springfield, the "HH" chest lacks drawer lips, and some chests in the group have applied moldings around the panels (see Catalogue Entry 1). The later examples in this shop tradition, the "AW" chest (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and the "KW" chest (Connecticut Historical Society), are better built and lightly constructed. They have turned legs. Like the "AA", "MS", and "PW" chests, both generations of furniture represented by the "HH" Ghest incorporate drawer bottoms with a .beveled edge that fits in a groove along the back of the facade (see Catalogue Entries 2,3,4). Similar to the "PW" chest, the grooves that support the drawers of the "HH" chest intersect the dovetail on each side. Unlike most Hampshire County chests, the bottom of the receptacle is composed of boards that are joined with a tongue-and-groove rather than with a lap joint made with a less specialized rabbet plane. Although the appearance of the "HH" chest and its mates is unlike Hartford County joinery, most of their construction characteristics are seen in chests

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associated with the Wethersfield area. The physical evidence in the "HH" chest suggests the workmanship of a joiner who trained in a Connecticut shop tradition and who made enough furniture to systematize, if not to perfect, his final product in Hampshire County. As such, the "HH" chest may reflect the seasonal working patterns of most early joiners who were unable to specialize in their trade year around.

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7. JOINED CHEST WITH. TWO DRAWERS (NO INITIALS) , HADLEY-HATFIELD AREA, 1700-1720.

WHITE OAK, BEECH, AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 45 3/8" (115.2 cm.) W: 49" (124.5 cm.) D: 20 5/8" (52.4 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 5c; the legs are replaced below the bottom rail; the lid is replaced; the applied moldings around the panels are missing. WADSWORTH ATHENEUM. GIFT OF WILLIAM B. GOODWIN.

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The joined chest without initials bears some decorative relationship to the "RA" and "HH" chests (see Catalogue Entries 5,6). The carved motif is contained within scribed borders on each structural member. ' Like the "HH" chest, the tulip-and-leaf combinations face one another on the central panel, precluding the placement of initials; not all of the chests in the group, however, share this panel design. Like the later "KW" and "AW" chests discussed in Catalogue Entry 6, joined chests related to the present example originally incorporated applied moldings around the panels, and there are no drawer lips. The uninitialed chest is related to the "RA" chest by the use of gouged highlights on the foliage and by the placement of the small dovetail above the groove in each drawer side. The drawer bottoms of both chests are butted into a rabbet cut along the lower edge of each facade.

The uninitialed chest represents a group of joined furniture that includes an interlocking diamond motif on their carved facades. Pinwheels are also occasionally used. The location of these motifs and the panel designs vary. Such inconsistencies, coupled with the use of lighter woods like beech and sycamore rather than the traditional oak, illustrate the experimentation that accompanies the fading of any shop tradition. Attempting to make a mark on their own, younger workmen are still bound to repeat many basic concepts that were taught to them during apprenticeship. As a result, their products are sometimes weak interpretations of a total conceptual unit.

The shop where these chests were made was located in the Hadley-Hatfield area. One chest with the diamond motif and gouged highlights is inscribed on the top rail, "Thankfull Taylor/February The 18 1701" (Suffield Historical Society). She was born at Hadley in 1680 and married

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Nathaniel Warner in 1710. They went to live in Suffield where the chest was "found" about 1895. Her sister, Hester, married in 1689 Eleazar Warner, the brother of Priscilla Warner and the son of John Warner of Hadley and 2 Springfield (see Catalogue Entry 4). Further evidence for a Hadley-Hatfield attribution lies in the fragment of a large, joined table with the diamond motif that was found reused as a railing in the attic of the Elihu White 3 House in Hatfield. The bulky turnings of the table legs are repeated on a cupboard owned in Hadley (see Catalogue Entry 12). Restored by Wallace Nutting to its full proportions, the table is owned by the Connecticut 4 Historical Society (fig. 15).

NOTES:

1. For example, see.Robert F. Trent, Hearts & Crowns: Folk Chairs of the Connecticut Coast, 1720-1840 (New Haven: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1977), pp. 29-30, 60-90. 2. Clair Franklin Luther, "The Hadley Chest," Antiques, 14, no. 4 (October 1928): 338-341; Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), Part II, "Genealogies," pp. 141-142. 3. An exterior doorway from the Elihu White House is installed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 4. Clair Franklin Luther, The Hadley Chest (Hartford: The Case, Lockwood, and Braxnard Company, 1935), p. 131.

NB: The "Thankfull Taylor" chest was badly.burned during a fire at the Alexander King House in Suffield in December 1983.

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m&u i ,v/r j* < *

Fig. 15. Leg of Joined Table, Hadley-Hatfield Area, 1700- 1720. Oak and beech (no microanalysis); H: 34 3/8" (87.3 cm.) W: 141" (358.1 cm.) D: 37 1/8" (94.3 cm.). Ex Coll. William B. Goodwin. Connecticut Historical Society. Two legs and a long portion of one rail were found in the Elihu White House at Hatfield.

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8. • JOINED CHEST WITH DRAWER/ INSCRIBED "ESTHER. LYMAN", NORTHAMPTON AREA, 1700-1720.

OAK AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 34 1/8" (87.7 cm.) W: 45" (114.3 cm.) D: 18V' (47 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 4; retains original paint. COLLECTION OF BERTRAM K. AND NINA FLETCHER LITTLE.

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Like the previous uninitialed chest, the "ESTHER LYMAN" chest is a distinct variant that is associated with a town in Hampshire County (see Catalogue Entry 7). The six chests in the group are identified by the fleurs-de-lis carved on the drawer facades and/or by the large compound petals on the panels, which are like an enlarged version of the Mannerist strapwork in the centers of the flanking panels on the "PK" chest (see Catalogue Entry 1). The carving on the Lyman chest is shallow and hurried with curling, antenna-like devices on the letters and on the base rail. In this shop, the carving was apparently done after the facade was assembled and painted.

Four of the six chests are carved with the full names of Northampton girls. However, the facades of the "SARAH STRONG" chest (Northampton Historical Society) and the "ESTHER COOK" chest (Amherst College) have been reassembled, which brings the inscriptions into some question. The "ESTHER LYMAN" chest and the "MARY BURT" chest (D.A.R. National Society Museum, Washington, D.C.) are in excellent condition. Esther was born at Northampton in 1698, the daughter of John and Mindwell Lyman; she married Benjamin Talcott in 1724 and moved to Bolton, Connecticut.^ According to tradition, the chest passed to her unmarried daughter, Esther (1736-1808), who bequeathed it to her nephew. The chest descended in the family to an Esther Smithson of Farmington, Connecticut. An early inscription in black paint on the underside of the drawer appears to read, "Esther R ." Mary Burt may have been either the daughter of David and Mary (Holton) Burt, who was baptized in 1676 and who married Doctor Thomas Hastings of Hatfield in 1706 (she married the joiner, Samuel Belden, Jr., in 1713); or her niece, the daughter of Henry and Hannah Burt, who was born in 1695 and who married Preserved Marshall in 1716.^

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Although the appearance of the "ESTHER LYMAN" chest is noticeably different from most Hampshire County joinery, the drawer construction is similar to the "RA" chest, the uriinitialed example, and the "isM" chest (see Catalogue Entries 5,7,9). The drawer facade is joined to each side with a small dovetail above the groove that supports the drawer, and the drawer bottom butts into a rabbet in the lower edge of the facade and is nailed. The lower backboard is nailed to the back posts like most "Hadley" chests. Despite the late date of the Lyman chest, it is made of traditional oak and yellow pine.

Although the Lyman chest is joined in a manner typical of Hampshire County, its decoration constitutes a departure from the norm. The stylistic difference may reflect the political isolation of Northampton within western Massachusetts. Northampton is the second-oldest town (1654), after Springfield, and the only permanently settled community north of the Holyoke Range. After the Glorious Revolution, Solomon Stoddard's sphere of influence was superimposed in secular matters by one James King. Sergeant King led Northampton in a mutiny against John Pynchon's control of the militia, which resulted in the appointment of local officers. Other members of the King family, Joseph (d. 1743) and John (d. 1745), were woodworkers in Northampton and may have influenced something of an aesthetic rebellion against the Pynchon imprint and 4 the traditional tulip-and-leaf design.

NOTES: 1. Lyman Coleman, Genealogy of the Lyman Family. (Albany: J. Munsell, 1872) , pp. 51,53. 2. Henry M. Burt, Life and Times of■Henry BUrt of Springfield and Some Of His Descendants (Springfield: Clark W. Bryan Company, 1893), p. 282. The chest was

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probably made for Mary Burt, daughter of Henry, who was born in 16 95. 3. Stephen Innes, Labor ill a New Land; Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983) , pp. 159-167. 4. Inventory of Joseph King, Northampton, 1743. Hampshire County Probate Records,. Vol. 6 (1739-1745), pp. 179a- 180; Inventory of John King, Northampton, 1745. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 7 (1745-1752), pp. 27a-29.

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9. JOINED CHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS, INSCRIBED "ISM", HADLEY AREA, 1700-1720.

I f I \ M U I M V.R

OAK, CHESTNUT, AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 42" (106.7 cm.) W: 45" (114.3 cm.) D: 20". (50.8 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 3a. PRIVATE COLLECTION.

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The "ISM" chest represents a large group of joined furniture that was probably made at Hadley. The group is characterized by flat carvihg that superimposes contiguous members and by centipede-like leaves. The foliage is nevertheless carefully laid out in a distinct manner:, split stalks on the flanking panels, an apparent human face (which is coincidental) where the tulip-and-leaf motif meets on the horizontal members, and compounded scrolls beneath the tulips. The well-made drawers are joined at the front of each side by a small dovetail above the groove, similar to the "RA" chest and the uninitialed chest with the diamond motif (see Catalogue Entries 5,7). The standard drawer lip at each end of the facades serves as a stop against the chamfered edges of the posts. Like most "Hadley" chests, the members are relieved around the panels using a mitering technique; the outer shoulder of the tenoned member protrudes at a forty-five degree (45°) angle to butt the chamfered edge of the mortised member. This treatment lightens the design without the use of expensive molding planes.

Chestnut appears in joined furniture with histories in northern Hampshire County. Combined with the traditional oak, its presence may indicate construction during the early eighteenth century. Furthermore, the overall carving technique, in which the motif runs from the rails onto the stiles, seems to reflect the new Baroque aesthetic of making a uniform surface of balanced parts. Although the old decorative vocabulary is retained, the surface treatment is organized around a central axis like the veneer on the high chests of drawers that were fashionable in Boston at the time. Some related joined furniture, like the. "SH" chest (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association), has three drawers and assumes the verticality of Baroque furniture made of dovetailed boards by cabinetmakers.

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Tempting genealogical hysteria, the origin of the "jSM" chest is fairly certain. It descended in the Morton family of Hadley, but the couple represented by the initials is not Jonathan and Sarah (Smith) Morton, as Luther 1 suggested, because the center initial denotes the surname. Instead, the chest may have been made for Sarah's brother, John Smith (b. 1671), who married Martha Golding in 1691. John and Martha Smith had no children. 2 The chest may have been transferred to Jonathan and Sarah Morton's family. When Morton died in 1767, he owned "a chist with Draws 30/" and "a panel Chist 9/6.1,3

The maker of the "isM" chest is uncertain because of too many family associations with local joiners rather than too few. John Smith's grandfather, Philip, was an important joiner in Hadley who died in 1680. Two of John Smith's sisters married joiners in the Montague family of Hadley: Hannah married John Montague in 1681, and Mary became the third wife of Peter Montague, John's uncle, in 1721. Martha Golding's sister, Sarah, married the joiner 4 Daniel Warner m 1704.

NOTES:

1. Clair Franklin Luther, The Hadley Chest (Hartford: The Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1935), pp. 95, 98, 115. Other chests in the group also have good histories in northern Hampshire County. The "SM" chest (Historic Deerfield) was found in the wall of an old house between Hadley and Amherst in the late nineteenth century. The "AW" chest (private collection) descended in the same family and in the same house at Deerfield. It may have been made for Abigail Wells of Hatfield who married Eliezer Hawks, Jr., in 1714. 2. Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early , History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), Part II, "Genealogies," p. 124.

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3. Inventory of Jonathan Morton, Hadley, 1768. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 13 (1768-1783), p. 7. ,4. Judd, Hadley, 2:95, 124.

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10. JOINED CHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS, INSCRIBED "LB", HADLEY AREA, 1700^1720.

OAK, CHESTNUT, AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 44V' (113 cm.) W: 19(49.5 cm.) D: 44" (111.8 cm.) NOTES: Kane Group 3c. OLD STURBRIDGE VILLAGE.

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The "LB" chest represents a large group of joined furniture that is similar to the type illustrated by the "I®M" chest (see Catalogue Entry 9). The two groups were made in the Hadley area during the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Minor differences include the use of an elongated "E" below the tulips on the "LB" chest and the use of compounded scrolls in the same voids on the "ISM" chest. Other chests in this general group have two dependent incised scrolls in the spaces below the repeated motif. More important conceptual differences are the employment of the insect-like motifs where the tulip-and-leaf combinations meet on the horizontal members of the "LB" chest instead of the face-like images on the axis of the "ISM" chest. Similarly, some of the chests have a split stalk on each flanking panel; others have a unified stalk,, Both of these designs are seen on chests related to the "LB" and "isM" examples. These dissimilarities may manifest the work of at least six contemporary shops operating in the same tradition in the Hadley area.^ Decoration aside, the construction details of the carcass of the "LB" chest are very similar to other examples in this large group. However, the drawer construction varies. On the "LB" chest, the groove that supports the drawer on each side intersects the dovetail at the front; on the "isM" chest, the dovetail is above the groove. The use of the insect-like figures on the "LB" chest represents a conscious effort to solve the visual merger of the paired tulip-and-leaf motifs at the center of the chest. The reason for their selection is unclear, but their quasi-geometric shapes anticipate the strong visual focus drawn to the central axis of contemporary Baroque furniture by brass escutcheons. Such innovation illustrates the mutation of the original design concept of "Hadley" chests

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in the hands of second- and third-generation apprentices during the eighteenth century.

The "LB" chest descended in the family of Marquis Dickinson of Amherst. The related "HD" and "SK" chests (private collections) also retain traditional histories in the Dickinson family of northern Hampshire County."2

NOTES:

1. The joinery of at least six men may be reflected in this large group of chests with overall shallow carving and incised lines. Several chests, represented by the "ISM" chest (see Catalogue Entry 9), have the face-like motif, split stalk on the flanking panels, compound scrolls below the tulips on the drawer facades, and a small dovetail above the groove on each drawer side (over twenty chests). This group is represented in public collections by the "Mary Pease" chest (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), "MS" chest (Brooklyn Museum), "SM" chest (Historic Deerfield), "HS" chest (Wadsworth Atheneum), "MW" chest (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and "MW" chest (Shelburne Museum). Several chests (over ten) have the same characteristics, but incorporate two pendent scrolls under the tulips on the drawer facades and sometimes contain white pine rather than yellow pine. This subtype is represented in public collections by the three-drawer "SH" chest and the "WA" chest (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield), "MM" chest (Wadsworth Atheneum), and "MW" chest (Edison Institute). These chests have traditional histories in the Deerfield area and may have been made slightly later, in the 1710s and 1720s (Kane Groups 3b and 3d). At least two surviving chests, including the "RS" chest (Old Sturbridge Village), have the face-like motif, but solid stalks on the flanking panels, an elongated "E" under the tulips, and a large dovetail intersected by the groove on each drawer side (Kane Group 3d). Three subgroups carry the insect-like motif. One group of at least eight chests, represented by the "LB" chest (Catalogue Entry 10), has solid stalks on the flanking panels, an elongated "E" below the tulips on the drawer facades, and a dovetail intersected by the groove on each drawer side (Kane Group 3c). These chests have family associations with Hadley. At least four chests have the same characteristics, but the stalk is split on the flanking panels (Kane Groups 3c and 3d). In the

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final group of at least nine chests, like the "EE" and "MR" chests (Yale University) and the "EK" chest (Mount Holyoke College), the insect and split stalk motifs are joined by pendent scrolls below the tulips on the drawer facades rather than the elongated "E" or the compound scrolls, and the dovetail is occasionally below the groove in each drawer side (Kane. Groups 3b and 3d) . Other variants within this general type, less well represented, are known. In all, there are about sixty chests in this general group; the author has not examined the construction methods of every example. 2. Clair Franklin Luther, The Hadley Chest (Hartford: The Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1935), pp. 71, 79, 94.

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11. JOINED CHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS (NO INITIALS), HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, 1710-1730.

* «.

^ ir •Jrt'V',* „

MAPLE, YELLOW POPLAR, YELLOW PINE, AND WHITE PINE (no microanalysis) H: 43*2" (110.5 cm.) W: 38" (96.5 cm.) D: 19" (48.3 cm.) NOTES: The lid is replaced; the paint has been renewed in the traditional red color. WADSWORTH ATHENEUM, WALLACE NUTTING COLLECTION, GIFT OF J.P. MORGAN.

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Uncarved joined chests illustrate the late date but not the decline of the tradition of joined furniture in Hampshire County. Chests, like the one here, were carefully made and incorporate the skills of both the joiner and the turner, who were often the same man in rural New England. The change of primary woods, from oak to maple, in uncarved chests was a concession to style rather than to technology. Maple allowed the joiner to lighten the design and to incorporate fashionable ball-turned feet that are integral with the posts. Maple is easier to turn than oak and had to be sawn into squared lengths to allow rythmic turning on the lathe. Maple does not rive as well as oak, which requires less labor, but sawmills operated in most New England towns and provided ample lumber. The joiner's furniture could then parallel the popularity of furniture made of light, dovetailed boards on turned legs by cabinetmakers.

Otherwise, the joiner strictly adhered to construction methods perfected over generations; he probably believed that the fruit of his technology could compete with the products of cabinetmakers. The careful workmanship of the uncarved chest illustrated here and its interior construction, identical to carved examples, prove the health of joinery traditions in the early eighteenth century. In this case, the groove in the drawer side intersects the single dovetail, and the bottom board butts into a rabbet cut along the lower edge of the drawer facade and is nailed. The bottom boards of the drawers and the receptacle meet with the traditional lap joint cut with a rabbet plane. The only short cut taken by this joiner--which may not have been a short cut at all— was the decision not to chamfer the entire length of the posts and rails that surround the panels (see Catalogue Entry 9). Rather than leave a shoulder on the tenoned members to

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match the chamfer on the mortised members, he. relieved the edges only around each panel, which gives the appearance that the joinery is mitered. The same method is used by stone masons. Consequently, the drawers of this uncarved chest have no lips at each end to serve as drawer stops.

The concession to style in these chests was matched by a concession to the ability of cosumers to pay. The smooth, uncarved surfaces of maple joined chests, with the traditional three-panel facade and side-hung drawers, allowed buyers an economical alternative that paralleled the stylish smooth surfaces of furniture made by cabinetmakers. The chest here was probably made at the same time as the carved examples of maple or beech (see Catalogue Entry 7). Heavy, traditional oak chests, like an uncarved example at Historic Deerfield,'*' illustrate that the option of economy in joined furniture was available earlier. Regardless of the generation, carving greatly increased the cost of what was already expensive furniture. When John Colton died at Springfield in 1727, he owned a "carved wainscot [that is, oaken or joined] chest 25s"; when Samuel Colton of Springfield died in 1744, he owned a "carved chest 40s" and "a red chest 30s," 2 perhaps similar to the example here. In all cases, the joined furniture recorded in these inventories retained their value well into the eighteenth century. Chests that may have been considered old-fashioned nevertheless were appraised at the rough equivalent of a month's common labor because of the time and workmanship invested in joined furniture. Uncarved joined chests illustrate the appeal of sturdy, traditional furniture among Hampshire County's broad middle class.

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NOTES:

1. Dean A. Fales, Jr., The, Furniture Of Historic Deerfield (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1976), p. 169. 2. Inventory of John Colton, Springfield, 1727. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 4 (1708-1780), p. 169; Inventory of Samuel Colton, Springfield, 1744. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 4, pp. 121a, 224.

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12. JOINED CUPBOARD WITH DRAWERS, INSCRIBED "HANNAH BARNARD", HADLEY AREA, CIRCA 1715.

OAK, MAPLE, CHESTNUT, AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 61 1/8" (155.3 cm.) W: 50" (127 cm.) D: 2133" (54 cm.) NOTES: The drawer support system has been rebuilt; the cupboard is said to have descended through collateral heirs from Hannah Barnard Hastings (b. 1742) of Hatfield; the cupboard was owned by Israel Sack, Inc., in 1934. GREENFIELD VILLAGE AND THE HENRY FORD MUSEUM, THE EDISON INSTITUTE.

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The expensive joined cupboard inscribed "HANNAH BARNARD" relies on elaborate painted decoration, rather than carving, for its stylishness and tips the opposite end of the economic scale represented by the uncarved chest (see Catalogue Entry 11). It was probably the most prominent piece of joined furniture in the household, excluding a bedstead with its costly hangings. While some expense may have been saved in using paint, the cost of the pigments and the time invested in the careful drafting and application of the paint meant little savings. Abreast with the changing aesthetic of the early eighteenth century, the appeal of smooth surfaces with defined borders was satisfied by the heavy, pseudo-classical moldings and ornamental paint on the cupboard's facade. The paint also allowed the maker to give the drawer fronts the paired effect of the matching flitches of walnut, maple, or ash veneers on the urban high chests of drawers made by cabinetmakers. The distinct dark blue borders of the simulated panels on the drawer facades provide the effect of herringbone inlay. Although the cupboard lacks turned feet, the vocabulary is present in the turned balusters of the cupboard section.

The traditional joinery of the Barnard cupboard is a stage for Baroque concepts that are conveyed entirely within the decorative experience of Hampshire County. The undulating vines on the door and posts of the cupboard are found carved into the "AA" and "MS" chests (see Catalogue Entries 2,3). The spreading plant growing from a hillock on the door panel reinterprets the tree of life motif of the Renaissance and is carved into the panels of most "Hadley" chests. The painted, inverted hearts on the side panels of the cupboard section are seen on the "PW" and "RA" chests (see Catalogue Entries 4,5). The curling tendrils on the painted letters are found on the "ESTHER

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LYMAN" chest (see Catalogue Entry 8). The shape of the turned balusters is similar to the surviving legs of a joined table found in a Hatfield attic (see figure 15). And the insect-like elements on the stiles of the upper section of the cupboard and at the centers of the drawers are carved into the "LB" chest (see Catalogue Entry 10).1

The inscription on the cupboard's facade also suggests construction in Hadley and placement in the parlor of one of the town's more comfortable homes. There were two Hannah Barnards in Hampshire County: one was born at Hadley in 1684, the daughter of Samuel and Mary (Colton) Barnard; the other one, her first cousin, was born at Deerfield a year later, the daughter of Joseph and Sarah 2 (Strong) Barnard. The first Hannah Barnard married well and seems a better candidate for ownership of the cupboard. She became the second wife of John Marsh of Hadley in 1715 and died in childbirth two years later. When Marsh died in 1725, he left a large estate appraised at 1 1249.2.11 (see pp. 16-17). Although "2 Cupboard Cloths 14s " are listed under "2^ Wives Goods" in his extensive inventory, 3 there is no mention of a cupboard. However, "A Carved work Chest 30s", "A Floward chest 32s ", and "a case of Drawers 1 4 " are listed; the last entry shows that cabinetry in the Baroque taste was owned in Hampshire County by 1725. Similarly, Nathaniel Burt II owned a "Floward Chest 40s" 4 when he died at Springfield in 1742. Marsh's flowered chest is listed among Hannah Barnard's belongings. Since flowered apparently does not mean carved, the chest may have derived its description from the abstract lobed flowers now seen on the facades of the Barnard cupboard, the joined chest of four drawers at the Winterthur Museum, and the "SW" chest with drawers at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield.

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NOTES:

1. The construction details of the cupboard also relate it to the workmanship of Hampshire County shops. For example, the drawers are built with the standard small dovetail above the groove that supports the drawer on each side; the bottom board butts into a rabbet in the edge of the drawer facade and is nailed. For similar treatment, see the "RA" chest (Catalogue Entry 5), the uninitialed chest (Catalogue Entry 7), the "ESTHER LYMAN" chest (Catalogue Entry 8), the "isM" chest (Catalogue Entry 9), and the "SW" chest with similar polychrome decoration (substantially repainted) that was purchased from an old Deerfield family by George Sheldon in 1870 (Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association). 2. Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts (Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905), Part II, "Genealogies," pp. 8, 91-92; George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Deerfield: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1895) , 2:65, 110 . 3. Inventory of John Marsh, Hadley, 1725. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 4 (1708-1780), pp. 134, 138-140. 4. Inventory of Nathaniel Burt II, Springfield, 1742. Hampshire County Probate Records, Vol. 4, pp. 143-144. 5. Homer Eaton Keyes, "New England Polychrome Chest of Drawers," Antiques, 10, no. 3 (September 1926): 189- 190; "Connecticut Valley Polychrome Press Cupboard," Antiques, 25, no. 4 (April 1934): 128.

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13. JOINED CHEST OF DRAWERS

HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, 1710-1720.

: « * t '

WHITE OAK, YELLOW POPLAR, YELLOW PINE, AND CHESTNUT (by microanalysis) H: 40 5/8" (103.2 cm.) W: 4 2 V (107.9 cm.) D: 21 3/8" (54.3 cm.) NOTES: The blue-black paint is the original surface; the wooden pulls are sympathetic replacements, using surviving examples on the "SH" chest at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield as prototypes. HISTORIC DEERFIELD, INC., GIFT IN MEMORY OF PETER MOORE ATWOOD.

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Joined chests of drawers, which lack a lidded storage compartment, were constructed in western Massachusetts during the early eighteenth century to parallel the fashion for furniture made of light, dovetailed boards by. cabinetmakers. This joined chest of drawers clearly illustrates the marriage of the traditional technology of joinery with new design concepts. Although the surface treatment of the Barnard cupboard suggests Baroque design, its basic form and the shape of all joined chests with the standard three-panel facade are rooted in medieval tradition (see Catalogue Entry 12).^ On the chest here, the past is represented by its heavy joinery without turned feet, the fully framed back panels, the side-hung drawers with the groove that intersects the large dovetail on each side, the three-groove incised molding on the sides of the posts found on most "Hadley" chests, and the inverted graduation of the drawers that finds the deepest drawer at the top. This drawer configuration may have derived from the placment of the largest storage compartment in the top of traditional lidded chests with drawers. However, the same forceful top-heaviness is also a design concept of early joined furniture. For example, the baluster turnings on cupboards that antecede the Barnard example often incorporate the 2 heavier elements at the top of the shaft. The concept of graduated drawers might otherwise be seen as a modern idea.

The new design elements of this chest are its full set of drawers, which suggests the storage of more specialized possessions in the household, by the heavy moldings planed from green chestnut that organize the horizontal areas and force the eye from one similar element to. the next in a neo-classical manner, and by the smooth black painted surface without pinwheels and "insects" that stresses the popular appeal for open space- In this case.

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the black paint may reflect the passion for the dark, exotic woods built into the best furniture of the seventeenth century or perhaps for the oriental lacquerwork popular in the eighteenth century. The ogee curve of the base molding is an especially modern touch. The restrained design of the chest, without painted motifs, and its drawer construction differ greatly from the Barnard cupboard. Although the black chest survives with no history, it appears that more than one shop produced avant-garde joined furniture in Hampshire County.

NOTES:

1* Victor Chinnery, Oak Furniture: The British Tradition (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Baron Publishing Company, 1979), pp. 109-123, 315-329. 2. For example, note the overall proportions of a cupboard and its turnings probably made in the Newbury, Massachusetts, area and dated 1680, pictured in Jonathan L. Fairbanks and Robert F. Trent, New England Begins: The Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1982), 3:531.

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14 . JOINED CHEST. OF DRAWERS HAMPSHIRE COUNTY, 1720-1730.

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MAPLE, YELLOW POPLAR, YELLOW PINE, AND WHITE PINE (by microanalysis) H: 48 3/4" (123.8 cm.) W: 43V (109.8 cm.) D: 19 1/8 " (48.6 cm.) NOTES: The painted graining is original; the hardware is replaced; the chest had wooden pulls; the chest was found in South Hadley in 1974. HISTORIC DEERFIELD, INC., HUGH B. VANDERBILT FUND FOR CURATORIAL ACQUISITIONS.

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The joined chest of drawers illustrated here parallels cabinetwork as closely as possible without adopting the new technology. It shows an awareness of contemporary furniture design in Boston by joiners and consumers alike in Hampshire County. The chest is joined in the traditional manner, with fully framed back panels and with side-hung drawers in! which the supporting groove intersects the dovetail on each side and the bottom board butts the rabbet cut along the lower edge of the drawer facade. However, the members of the chest are reduced in scale, like the uninitialed chest with the conservative, three-panel facade, to lighten the design and to expedite turning the feet on a lathe (see Catalogue Entry 11). In this case, the primary purpose in leaving the surface uncarved was not to reduce cost but to imitate expense. In fact, the sound joinery of six drawers assured expense. The joiner further refined the light maple frame by applying a narrow cornice and base molding and by highlighting the vertical members with a half-round bead in order to stress the relationship to contemporary cabinetwork. The chest is more vertical in feeling than earlier examples. The joiner adhered so completely to his model that the drawer arrangement (minus the bottom drawer) is identical to the upper case of a high chest of drawers, graduated in the modern way. The swirled black paint applied on a red undercoat, with the drawers in place, imitates burled veneer on urban furniture. The model was familiar to the joiner in Hampshire County, and he perfected his product through repetition. The clean proportions of the chest are accented by a cornice molding that closely replicates the cornices of Boston chests and that required ownership of an expensive, specialized plane. ' The consistent use of yellow poplar specifically for the drawer facades shows the joiner's understanding that the paint

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would respond better to a lightweight wood more uniformly grained than maple or pine. The chest was fully decorated on the top and sides,, unlike the carved chests that are more frontal, and was fitted with locks on the middle drawers. The chest has no history, but was found on the porch of a house in South: Hadley, covered with a later coat of white paint, in 1974.

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15. JOINED GHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS DEERFIELD AREA, 1715-1730.

MAPLE AND YELLOW PINE (no microanalysis) H: 453s" (114.9 cm.) W: 38" (96.5 cm.) D: 1833" (46.4 cm.) NOTES: Chalk inscriptions under the lid read "Lucy Allis," "...Matton 1 shilling 6 pence," and "Sarah Matton;" there are traces of red paint on the exterior; the rear feet are replaced; the chest was formerly owned by Susan Hawks, an antiques dealer in Deerfield. HISTORIC DEERFIELD, INC.

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Like less costly, uncarved chests with three-panel facades, simulated joined chests of drawers were made in Hampshire County at reduced expense (see Catalogue Entry 11). This chest includes two false drawers at the top that conceal the usual lidded storage compartment. Otherwise, the chest closely parallels the chest of drawers with painted graining in its lightweight maple frame, bulky turned feet, molding profiles, and drawer construction (see Catalogue Entry 14).* The paint on this chest has been removed. The present example differs in the application of the lower backboard, which is nailed to the carcass in Lhe normal Hampshire County manner rather than fully framed in place (see Catalogue Entries 12,13,14). This detail illustrates the continuity of shop practices that drew upon traditional methods.

Other details of this later chest show innovation and adaptation. The upper backboard of the chest is mortised into the rear posts, like a deep rail, rather than framed between two narrow rails and posts. Although the drawers on the present example are side-hung, later chests often contain dovetailed drawers that ride on the bottom 2 edges of their sides in the modern manner. Sometimes, the rear dovetails of the drawers are extremely long and serve as drawer stops. Such techniques were adopted to lighten the design of joined chests. They document the merger of the joinery and cabinetmaking trades in Hampshire County during the early eighteenth century.

The chest is inscribed "Sarah Matton" on the underside of the lid. She may have been the daughter of Philip Mattoon (d. 1696) who settled at Deerfield in 1678 at the encouragement of John Pynchon (see pp. 12-13). Mattoon married Sarah, the sister of John Hawks (1643-after 1721), in 1677. Their daughter, Sarah, was born in 1687

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 136 3 and married Zachariah Field in 1711. John Hawks is documented as a joiner; he contracted to finish the 4 Deerfield meeting house, begun in 1696. It has been suggested that John Hawks made the chest for his niece. His name has been mistakenly associated with lightweight joined chests since Luther's attribution in 1933. However, Hawks was born in 1643 and is unlikely to have made a chest in the modern taste during his seventies. Furthermore, he left Deerfield after the town was razed in 1704 and lived with his daughter in Waterbury, Connecticut. Hawks was connected, however, with the Allis family of Hatfield; g his second wife was the widow of Samuel Allis, the turner. Perhaps, the chest was made by Allis in-laws for Sarah Mattoon. The name "Lucy Allis" is also inscribed in the 7 chest, but the reference probably cites a later owner. The varied construction of maple joined chests shows that they, like the carved chests, were produced by several shops in Hampshire County.

NOTES:

1. The two drawers of the Mattoon family chest were built with the supporting groove intersecting the dovetail on each side. 2. Some later joined chests, often with fully dovetailed drawers that slide on their bottoms, are built with the beveled edges of the side panels on the exterior. The panels of earlier chests are flush on the exterior. There is no documentation for attributing the later examples to the Hatfield area. .3. George Sheldon, A History of Deerfield, Massachusetts, 2 vols. (Deerfield: Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 1895), 2:239. 4. Sheldon, 2:189. 5. Clair Franklin.Luther, "John Hawks as a.Hadley Chest. Maker," History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, 8 (1930-1938):.63-74; Dean A. Fales, Jr., The Furniture of Historic Deerfield (New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, 1976), p. 177.

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6. Sheldon, 2:188-189. 7. Sheldon, 2:27-28. The inscription "Lucy Allis" may denote Lucinda Allis, a great granddaughter of the joiner, Ichabod Allis, or her sister-in-law, Lucy DeWolf, who married John Belding Allis in 180.0.

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16. BOARD CHEST WITH TWO DRAWERS, INSCRIBED "KK", NORTHAMPTON AREA, CIRCA 1720.

YELLOW PINE AND OAK (no microanalysis) H: 47" (119.4 cm.) W: 46 5/8" (118.4 cm.) D? 18 1/8" (46 cm.) NOTES: The painted surface is original. HISTORIC DEERFIELD, INC., GIFT OF WILLIAM W.. NEWTON AND MRS. BENJAMIN CHILDS IN MEMORY. OF MRS. HERBERT. NEWTON.

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The "KK" chest illustrates a final expression of the tradition of joined furniture in Hampshire County. It also reflects the depth of cultural interest in a specific type of regional furniture. Inexpensively made, the chest is a signature of cultural acceptance throughout a society of consumers who furnished their homes with costly joinery and with economical imitations made of boards.

The "KK" chest has oak posts with turned feet that define its height, like all joined chests, tables, and chairs. But the "KK" chest is not joined. Instead, the boards that enclose the chest are simply and inexpensively nailed to the posts; the drawers are also nailed together. Only the profile of the chest, in a darkened room, gives the appearance of expensive joinery.

Nevertheless, the "KK" chest was assembled with some innovation. The turned feet are competent for the time and place; the chest may have been the product of a turner's shop where the tools and skills of joinery were lacking. The tradesman did possess a specialized molding plane to make the ogee base molding, or perhaps he obtained the molding from a neighbor. Its profile is similar to the cornices on the joined chest of drawers with painted graining and on the Mattoon family chest with drawers (see Catalogue Entries 14,15). Although the drawer parts are nailed together, their assembly suggests exposure to a shop tradition. An integral bead of wood runs along the lower edge of the back of the drawer facade and supports the beveled edge of the drawer bottom, similar to the drawers in the "AA" and "MS" chests (see Catalogue Entries 2,3) .

The painted surface illustrates the same knowledge of joined furniture. The familiar motifs of "insects",

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geometric lobed flowers, and antenna-like termini are found on the "KK" chest and on the expensive Barnard cupboard (see Catalogue Entry 12). A painted rendition of the diamond motif carved on the uninitialed chest from the Hadley-Hatfield area, was applied to the bottom drawer of the "KK" chest (see Catalogue Entry 7). These motifs— in yellow, blue, red, and white— are organized on a black background in abstract simulation of the gesso figures on urban "japanned" chests.'*' Nevertheless, the traditional configuration of early joined chests is intact. Like the carved examples with matched panels flanking a different central panel on their facades, two identical enlarged "insect" motifs flank the lobed geometric flower in the middle of the "KK" chest with two drawers below.

The initials "KK" appear at the ends of the top drawer. They may represent Katron [Catherine] King, a daughter of John King (1657-1720), who was born at Northampton in 1701 and who married, as her second husband, the mason Nathaniel Phelps (see pp. 38,42). She was an in-law of the donors' fifth great grandfather, Samuel Childs, Jr. (1712-1786), 2 of Deerfield.

NOTES:

1. John H. Hill, "The History and Technique of Japanning and the Restoration of the Pimm Highboy," The American Art Journal, 8, no. 2 (November 1976): 59-84. 2. James R. Trumbull, "Northampton Genealogies" (Unpublished third volume to History of Northampton [1898] on file at the Forbes Library, Northampton, MA.), p. 261.

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141

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Pynchon, William. "Letters.of William Pynchon." Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 48 (1914-1915): 35-51. Sewall, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674-1729. Editied by M. Halsey Thomas. 2 vols. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973. Springfield. Hampden County Registry of Deeds. Pre-1786 land records for old Hampshire County. Springfield Town Records,.1636-1736. In Henry M. Burt. The First Century of the History Of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736. 2 vols. Springfield: 1898. Springfield. Connecticut Valley Historical Museum. Ledgers of John Pynchon, 6 vols., Springfield, 1652-1702. Taylor, Edward. The Diary of Edward Taylor. Edited by Francis Murphy. Springfield: Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, 1964. Woodbridge, Dudley. "Diary of Dr. Dudley Woodbridge." Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 17 (1879-1880): 337-340.

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Bassett, Preston R. "Collector's Notes: An Unrecorded Hadley Chest." Antiques 75, no. 5 (May 1959): 460-461. Bissell, Charles S. Antique Furniture in SUffield, Connecticut, 1670-1835. Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society and Suffield Historical Society, 1956. Bissell, Linda A. "From One Generation to Another: Mobility in Seventeenth-Century Windsor, Connecticut." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 31, no. 1 (January 1974): 79-110. Brainard, Newton. "The Deerfield Chests." Walpole Society Note Book (1951):18-19. Breen, T.H.,and Foster, Stephen. "The Puritans' Greatest Achievement: A Study of Social Cohesion in Seventeenth- Century Massachusetts." journal of American History 60 (June 1973): 5-22. Breen, T.H. The Character of the Good Ruler: A Study of Puritan Political Ideas in New England, 1630-1730. 1970. Reprint. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1974. Bulkeley, Houghton. "A Discovery on the Connecticut Chest." The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 23, no. 1 (January 1958): 17-19. Burt, Henry M. The First Century of the History of Springfield: The Official Records from 1636 to 1736. 2 vols. Springfield: 1898. Bushman, Richard L. From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Chinnery, Victor. Oak Furniture: The British Tradition. Woodbridge, Suffolk, England: Baron Publishing, 1979. Coleman, Lyman. Genealogy of the Lyman Family. Albany: J. Munsell, 1872. "Connecticut Valley Polychrome Press Cupboard." Antiques 25, no. 4 (April 1934): 128. Cook, Edward M . , Jr. The Fathers of the Towns: Leadership and Community Structure in Eighteenth-Century New England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Cooke, Edward S., Jr. Fiddlebacks and Crooked Backs: Elijah Booth and Other Joiners in. Newtown and Woodbury, 1750-1820. Waterbury, Connecticut: The Mattatuck Historical Society, 1982. Cummings, Abbott Lowell. The ’Framed Houses of Massachusetts Bay, 1625-1725. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1979.

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Green, Richard L. "Fertility Symbols on the Hadley Chests." Antiques 112, no. 2 (August 1977): 250-257. Greven, Philip, Jr. Four' Generations: Populaition, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1970. "Hadley and Connecticut Chests." Antiques 49, no. 2 (Febuary 1946): 132-133. Henretta, James A. "Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 35, no. 1 (January 1978): 3-32. History of the Connecticut Valley. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1879. Hoadley, R. Bruce. Understanding Wood: A Craftsman's Guide to Wood Technology. Newtown, Connecticut: The Taunton Press, 1980. Holland, J.G. History of Western Massachusetts, 2 vols. Springfield: S. Bowles and Company, 1855. Hosley, William N., Jr., and.Zea, Philip. "Decorated Board Chests of the Connecticut River Valley." Antiques 119, no. 5 (May 1981): 1146-1151. Hubbard, William. The Present State of New England. London: 1677. Innes, Stephen. "Land Tenancy and Social Order in Springfield, Massachusetts, 1652-1702." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 35, no. 1 (January 1978): 33-56. Innes, Stephen. Labor in a New Land: Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983. Johnson, Clifton. Historic Hampshire in the Connecticut Valley■ Springfield: Milton Bradley Company, 1932. Johnston, Phillip. Art in 17th-Century New England. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1977. Judd, Sylvester. History of Hadley, Including the Early History of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst, and Granby, Massachusetts. Springfield: H.R. Huntting and Company, 1905. Kane, Patricia E. "The Joiners of Seventeenth Century Hartford County." The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 35, no. 3 (July 1970): 65-85. Kane, Patricia E. "The Seventeenth-Century Furniture of the Connecticut Valley: The.Hadley Chest Reappraised." Arts of the Anglo-American Community 'in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 79-122. Edited by Ian M.G.' Quimby. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1975.

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Keyes, Homer Eaton. "New England Polychrome Chest of Drawers." Antiques 10, no. 3 (September 1926): 189-190. Kirk, John T. Connecticut. Furniture: Seventeenth aind Eighteenth Centuries. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1967. Kirk, John T. American Fvlrniture and the British Tradition to 1830. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982. Leach, J. Granville. "Chronicle of the Bement Family in America for Clarence Sweet Bement." Manuscript. Connecticut Historical Society, n.d. Lockridge, Kenneth. A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 19 70. Lockwood, John H. Westfield and Its Historic Influences, 1669-1919. Westfield: 1922. Lockwood, Luke Vincent. Colonial Furniture in America. 2 vols. 1913. Reprint. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1926. Lockwood, Luke Vincent. "Nicholas Disbrowe, Hartford Joyner." Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 18, no. 5 (May 1923): 118-123. Lucas, Paul R. Valley of Discord: Church and Society along the Connecticut River, 1636-1725. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1976. Luther, Clair Franklin. "The Hadley Chest." Antiques 14, no. 4 (October 1928): 338-341. Luther, Clair Franklin. "A Late Hadley Chestmaker." Antiques 16, no. 3 (September 1929): 202-203. Luther, Clair Franklin. "John Hawks as a Hadley Chest Maker." History and Proceedings of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association 8 (1930-1938): 63-74. Luther, Clair Franklin. The Hadley Chest. Hartford: The Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1935. Luther, Clair Franklin. Supplemental List of Hadley Chests. Hartford: The Case, Lockwood and Brainard Company, 1938. Lyon, Irving Whitall. The Colonial Furniture of New England. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1891. Mather, Cotton. Magnalia Christi Americana. London: 1702. McIntyre, Ruth A. William Pynchon: Merchant and Colonizer, 1590-1662. Springfield: Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, 1961.

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Melvoin, Richard. "Communalism in Frontier Deerfield." Paper read at a colloquium at Historic Deerfield, Inc., 26 March 1983. Typescript, Henry N. Flynt Library, Deerfield, MA. Miller, Amelia F. "The Indian House." Deerfield Alumni Journal 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1960): 3-12. "More Hadley Chests." Antiques 84, no. 3 (September 1963): 304. Morgan, Edmund S. "New England Puritanism: Another Approach." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 18, no. 2 (April 1961): 236-242. "Nicholas Disbrowe, Joiner." Antiques 4, no. 3 (September 1923) : 114-115. "Numbered Hadley Chests and a Bible Box." Antiques 76, no. 5 (November 1959): 439. Nutting, Wallace. Furniture of the Pilgrim Century. Framingham, Massachusetts: Old America Company, 1924. Nutting, Wallace. Furniture Treasury. New York: Macmillan Company, 1928. Peladeau, Marius. "A Hadley Chest Reconsidered." Antiques 117, no. 5 (May 1980): 1084-1086. Pope, Charles H. A History of the Dorchester Pope Family, 1634-1888. Boston: 1888. Powell, Sumner Chilton. Puritan Village: The Formation of a New England Town. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1963. Powell, Walter L. "A Question of Accounts: Samuel Taylor or John Pynchon 3rd,." The Connecticut Historical Society Bulletin 45, no. 4 (October 1980): 123-126. Pye, David W. The Nature and Art of Workmanship. 1968. Reprint. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971. "Riddles and Replies [on Hadley chests]." Antiques 38, no. 6 (December 1940): 302. Rutman, Darrett B. "Governor Winthrop's Garden Crop: The Significance of Agriculture in the Early Commerce of Massachusetts Bay." William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, 20, no. 3 (July 1963): 396-415. Rutman, Darrett B. Winthrop's Boston: A Portrait of a Puritan Town. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1965.

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