The late 19th century in America was a time of impending change, economically, socially and politically. The Western frontier was essentially a thing of the past, the Midwest was safe and the far West was livable. The South was still languishing from Reconstruction but its time would come.

Between 1870 and 1916 more than 25 million immigrants poured into the country and the population swelled from 40 million to over 100 million in that nearly half century. All these new consumers wanted new products, needed new jobs and demanded delivery systems for it all. The amount of railroad track in the nation increased from 9,000 miles in 1850 to over 200,000 miles in 1900, spurring growth along the right of way.

The country’s furniture industry, growing as fast as it knew how, was unable to keep up with the demand for new household goods with its antiquated design, production, marketing and delivery systems based primarily on the experiences and practices of the early Industrial Revolution. Something had to give and change was coming.

Two major forces would soon coincide to bring a vast quantity of relatively high-grade furnishings to middle-class Americans, something that previously had been totally out of their reach. The two movements, one philosophical and one economic, would combine to produce the Progressive Era from 1890 to the beginning of World War I. Continue reading

One of the most interesting and important times in American history is quickly fading from living memory. The Depression Era, as it is commonly called, encompassed the better part of three decades early in the 20th century and it had a profound effect on the course of the country, the conduct of the World War that followed and even on our life today.

While the Great Depression did not officially start until 1929 and was not truly over until the early 1950s, the general term for the period covers most of the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The survivors of that time are fast leaving us and with them will go a firsthand familiarity with an era that gave us a number of important words, phrases and concepts that many of us use today without really knowing the original context of the usage or the impact of them in their heyday.

Lifestyle words like Prohibition, speakeasy, bathtub gin, flapper and zoot suit come to mind as do governmentally generated ideas like the NRA (National Recovery Act), the WPA (Works Project Administration), the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) and the New Deal. And of course there were darker words like breadline, soup kitchen, Apple Annie and the match girl that reflect the desperation of the times.

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It’s hard to find a time in history when the everyday affairs of humans were not intertwined with those of animals, as poacher, as prey or as master. It didn’t take long in the development of the human brain for gifted artisans to depict the likenesses other creatures on the walls of the caves of Lascaux, usually in remote spots not normally occupied or scratched into rocks in high places. Were the images used as worship of the creatures depicted? Were they used as part of spell casting to help the hunters with greater harvests or perhaps to bless the creatures for greater fertility? Maybe they were to honor the creatures for what they provided or perhaps the artists just like drawing animals better than human figures.

Ancient civilizations took the creature feature to a higher level bringing examples of them into the home in three-dimensional forms incorporated into furniture. Abundant examples of Egyptian furniture have been discovered that reveal chair legs ending in the paws of a lion. One example that is at least 3,000 years old is in the British Museum. The basic form of the Egyptian bed remained unchanged for 2,000 years. Most of them had legs in the form of animal extremities ranging from heavy bull’s legs with hooves to elegant and graceful gazelle legs to feline legs with paw and claw. This last example perhaps was in keeping with the use of panther hides as bed coverings.

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Latin is a dead language, dead as it can be. First it killed the Romans, and now it’s killing me.” I heard that refrain numerous times in the two years of high school that I took instruction in that archaic form of communication. One of the things that always bugged me about Latin was the requirement that nouns have a gender associated with them. For example a table was tabula, a masculine form. Other nouns were feminine, and yet others were neutral. Why? It didn’t really matter to me, but it must have mattered to the Romans, because the plural and possessive forms of nouns were determined by their gender.

Today it matters even less to most of us what the supposed gender, if any, of a piece of furniture, happens to be. A chair is a chair, and a table is a table. That sexist stuff doesn’t work anymore – except in certain cases like a “gentleman’s chest” or a “lady’s writing desk.” But those are easy to figure out, and most of those items are from a time past.
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