Category Archives: Antiques

Research and related queries.

Colonial Diary Offers Clues About Scandinavian Cupboard

An impromptu weekend trip to a friend’s Lake George summer home, the fascinating mid-18th-century journal of a scholarly foreign traveler, and an interestingly carved and painted 1789 Scandinavian tabernacle or bonnet-top cupboard that had previously stirred my inquisitive juices. That’s what’s on my plate today, and what I’ll serve in soothing soapstone warmth wafting from […]

Leather-Working Mecca

An old cliché tells us familiarity breeds contempt. So, how about ignorance? Does not familiarity breed that, too? Well, in my case, the answer is an unapologetic yes. Let me explain, focusing on boyhood South Deerfield. At the southwest corner of Pleasant and North Main, a short distance up the road from my earliest home […]

Clockwork

It’s Wednesday morning, column day, and nothing seems to be going right, even choosing a topic difficult. One of those days, I suppose. Always dangerous. Never know where a man might wander on a warm spring day. As for my unexpected issues, well, I imagine you all know the drill. First you go out fiddlehead […]

Chapman/Pierson highboy

Discovery is exciting, precisely what keeps people hunting through moldy cellars, dusty attics and decaying barns, yard sales and crack-of-dawn flea markets. Collecting’s a disease, one that can be highly contagious, a fever that grips you … which reminds me of a recent visit to my Greenfield, Ma., home, one that bore sweet, salubrious fruit, […]

Sanderson chest

I’ve been poking around lately in the western Franklin County hill towns of Conway and Ashfield, walking old roads, investigating cellar holes, town histories, old maps, genealogies, deeds, probate records, talking to landowners … trying to connect the dots. It’s never easy, this world of discovery, but always rewarding, even invigorating. Great fun. Cheap entertainment. […]

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