Furniture Makers from 100 Years ago

My work-in-progress is about a guy that buys a bureau and mirror in an estate sale. What the mirror shows him isn’t just his reflection. 

In the story, the bureau was designed and built by a family of furniture makers a hundred years earlier. New Jersey had a lot of small businesses a hundred years ago. I did write about that in “Mix Tapes and Empty Buildings.” Many of those businesses grew into a big corporations. 

Then they moved out. 

I looked into furniture makers a century ago when I wrote this novella. They weren’t an inspiration for the story, but Broyhill was started by a family in 1926 in North Carolina. They eventually sold the company to a big corporation. Thomasville was created in 1904 by two woodworkers. It must have been a good time to create a furniture company. That’s a big corporation now.

We don’t really pay attention to our furniture. Back in American Revolutionary times, they sat on these hard wood chairs. Everything was wood: chairs, tables, shoes, some believe teeth but that wasn’t true. Church pews to this day are still hard wood. 

Say what you will about how hard that wood was, it lasted. Go to Mongers Market in Connecticut. Machines from 100 years ago and furniture from that time are for sale. The place is huge so they must get a lot of business. That old furniture and other well-made goods last.