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Excerpt from Furniture of the Pilgrim Century: 1620-1720, Including Colonial Utensils and Hardware HE interest in native wood early furniture is of recent growth. Many persons who formerly collected Sheraton types have gone farther back through the Hepplewhite period, through the Chippendale, to the Dutch period, and of late not a few persons collected only Americana, by which term, applied to furniture, is meant not merely furniture made in America, but made also of native woods. The Spirit of patriotism stirred by the great war, has stimulated interest in the work our fathers left. The study of American furniture has only recently reached the point of recognizing how desirable is the handiwork formed of local materials, as modified from foreign styles by the exigencies of the colonists. The late Empire furniture has acquired, without reason, in New York at least, the epithet Colonial. We Should do what is possi ble to relieve our early fathers of the responsibility for such productions. Nothing is colonial that follows 1776, and so far as concerns those who de sire to be correct the Colonial name Should not be applied to any furniture later than Chippendale. But what did the second generation of settlers, and to some extent the first generation, have as furniture? This fascinating question has begun to call to us until thousands ask it. This book is the effort to answer the ques tion, and hence nothing is shown here that was not or could not have been made in America before the time of the cabriole leg, except the gateleg table, a Style which continued half way through the eighteenth century; and pine cupboards, which for the sake of completeness, are Shown to the close of their period. No comparison can be made between the rich productions of England during the seventeenth century in furniture, and English books about it, with American furniture. A compendium such as is easy to produce, full of copies indiscriminately made of English and American pieces, is no longer satisfactory. This book shows few pieces of furniture that have been illustrated before, except in some instances of fuller restorations of pieces previously shown. This statement is made with trembling because noone can be absolute in knowledge of this kind. The main feature of the book, however, is that most of the examples here shown were until recently unknown. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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