Antique collecting can trigger the wildest, most unpredictable and fulfilling adventures – some hot and fruitful, others cold and barren. When an enticing, dangling thread of inquiry gets tugged and just keeps on giving, the eager anticipation of important discovery can be truly exhilarating.
Case in point: a pair of 18th-century banister-back chairs I recently purchased in their original red paint. I found them in the local marketplace for a reasonable cost. I have subsequently learned that these chairs, typically associated with the first half of the 18th century, came to market from a Northampton collector with a snooty preference for original finish; likely, however, he did not know they were made in Conway.
Their distinctive crest rail immediately signaled Conway to me, giving me an edge that’s important as a collector. I quickly recognized it because I had previously examined and photographed an identical chair on display at the Conway Historical Society. My interest in that chair was a decorative design element into which I had personal insight.
Most folks have probably passed the historical-society chair over the years without recognizing the two unusual, decorative fishtails ascending from the crest rail, protruding on each side of a dome centered between the finials. This maritime motif is generally associated with 18th-century furniture, looking-glass frames, and clocks made in New London County, Connecticut and Philadelphia. Because it’s rare, it often goes unrecognized by even sophisticated observers.
The reason I know the fishtail motif is that I own a family, six-drawer, Chippendale tall chest wearing six examples from the same template descending from an otherwise unremarkable straight bracket base. It gets better. My chest and the historical-society chair came from the same Conway homestead of Isaiah Wing (1761-1834), who moved there from Harwich, Cape Cod in 1774.
Both pieces were almost certainly crafted by the same hand, or at the very least are from the same workshop. I bought the chest some 25 years ago from Sunderland auctioneer-dealer William Lloyd Hubbard, who had inherited it from a spinster Amherst aunt. Hubbard, the dean of local antique dealers at the time, thought I should have it because it had descended through several brides in my Whately Sanderson family. I didn’t argue.
My immediate question was who built it? Then an obvious candidate came to mind: master craftsman William Mather (1766-1835), who arrived in Whately with his sea-captain father and Lyme, Connecticut family in 1787. Trained in Connecticut at the mouth of New England’s largest river, Mather was a joiner who built houses – and some truly remarkable furniture – before leaving the area for Canandaigua, New York around 1825.
Mather’s signature piece known by collectors throughout the land is a Chippendale high case of drawers with vine-carved pilasters, said to have last sold for more than $300,000. It was built for my fifth-great-grandfather Deacon Thomas Sanderson (1746-1824) around the time of his 1803 move from Canterbury, today upper River Road in Whately, to Indian Hill, now the start of Whately Glen.
According to Mather’s account books, owned by Historic Deerfield and Delaware’s Winterthur Museum, the carpenter and Deacon Sanderson did a lot of business. Around the time of his move to and upgrade of Adonijah Taylor’s home and millsite, Sanderson paid Mather $28 for the highboy and an additional dollar for a companion “desk and bookcase,” the whereabouts of which is today unknown.
The cumulative $57 expense was no small fee at the time – Mather charged a daily fee of $1.25 for his services, and 75 cents a day for the “unskilled” laborers assisting him.
As the son of sea captain Benjamin Mather and apprentice to a coastal Connecticut joiner, young William had maritime motifs in his soul. Thus, the expertly carved seashell centered on the skirt of the Sanderson highboy. Maritime embellishments such as fishtails, lobster tails, whale’s tails, and seashells occasionally showed up on the priciest New London County furniture crafted during the last half of the 18th century. So – coupled with the fact that he had a long, documented business relationship with Deacon Sanderson – Mather was in my mind the most likely maker of my fishtail chest.
There was, however, a doubt-stirring caveat.
On the back of the chest is a handwritten list of the Sanderson brides who received it as a wedding gift. It begins with the 1816 marriage of Mehitable Wing to Silas Sanderson, a younger son who accompanied Deacon Thomas to Indian Hill. The problem was that the chest’s construction screamed 18th century.
An example of “survival furniture,” perhaps? Well, maybe, but I had trouble accepting that. My suspicion was that Mehitable was probably not the wedding-chest’s first recipient. Yes, it accompanied her to her new Whately home as part of her dowry, but the Chippendale style and Queen Anne girth suggested it had been made a generation earlier.
Hmmm? Could it have been built instead for the wedding of Mehitable’s mother, Zelinda Allis, who married Isaiah Wing in 1786 and died from childbirth complications in 1797? Mehitable, born 1790, was Zelinda’s third child and first daughter, as well as her first-married daughter. Thus, she was a likely recipient of such a traditional wedding gift.
Proving a line of descent back to the Wing homestead was another matter, though, and I eventually relegated the search to the back burner until the banister-back chairs came to light. So, this recent purchase unleashed a new round of research, this time reaching into old Conway deeds for potential furniture-makers.
I had previously done some Conway deed research along the Deerfield line and, combined with various genealogical explorations, had noticed a surge of Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard families into Conway in the 1770s and 1780s. If one or more of these folks named Dunham, Mayhew, Look and Manter brought woodworking skills to their nascent “frontier” community, perhaps the fishtails came with them.
I emailed Conway Historical Commission chairwoman Sarah Williams, whose research often overlaps mine. We had previously discussed early Conway/Ashfield settlers from Cape Cod and the Islands, but I had never taken a deep dive into how they made ends meet.
The Cape Cod Wing family was, of course, the first one to activate my inquisitive juices, but I could find no evidence that Isaiah, his father or brothers were carpenters. Though distant cousin Elisha Wing (1782-1869) was a prolific 19th-century Ashfield housewright/joiner, I judged him too young to have made my chest or chairs.
My next target was the Dunham family, early settlers in Conway’s “South Part” community resting in the southeast corner of town. Col. Daniel Dunham Jr. (1711-1797) came to town from Martha’s Vineyard in 1774 with a family that included sons Daniel, Cornelius and Jonathan, all of whom show up in Conway deeds. Though the Dunhams didn’t stay, they left many gravestones in the old South Part Cemetery.
“So,” I emailed Williams, “were any of the Dunhams woodworkers?”
“Yes,” she responded. “Good thinking. There’s a deed identifying Daniel Dunham Jr. as a housewright. You may also want to explore Wadsworth Mayhew, a Martha’s Vineyard joiner who followed the Dunhams to Conway.”
Bingo! Deed and online research down many rabbit holes immediately convinced me Mayhew was my man. He not only knew the Dunhams: in 1778, his sister Lucinda (1738-1815) married Cornelius (1748-1816) in Conway, where they are buried. Also, a couple of years after settling in Cambridge, New York, in about 1790, Mayhew sold to Cornelius and Lucinda the last of his Conway landholdings within spitting distance of his Roaring Brook sawmill.
Born to a prosperous Martha’s Vineyard family in 1741, Wadsworth Mayhew came to Conway with younger brother Zephaniah and Lucinda around 1776, when he paid James Gilmore more than 193 pounds for a 70-acre parcel with dwelling and outbuildings. Three years later he paid Captain Lucius Allis 20 pounds for a small adjoining parcel where he may have built his sawmill.
Captain Allis could be an important twist to our fishtail-chest discussion. He was Mehitable Wing Sanderson’s maternal grandfather, and an important Conway character. Could this Mayhew neighbor have commissioned the wedding chest for daughter Zelinda? I believe so. In fact, I think you can take it to the bank. And it would have been the perfect occasion for Mayhew to decorate a chest of drawers with six of his signature fishtail drops in an uncustomary place.
Martha’s Vineyard deeds identify Mayhew as a joiner before his move to Conway, where he is also sometimes thus identified. By the time he left Conway before 1790 for Cambridge, New York, an outgoing deed identifies him as a “shop joiner,” the first such deed reference I have seen. It clearly refers to a furniture-maker. His shop was likely one of the Gilmore outbuildings he purchased, it conveniently close to the sawmill he soon built.
Further research shows that Wadsworth’s nephew – Abiah Wadsworth Mayhew (1774-1850), son of Zephaniah – was also a skilled cabinetmaker with an early Spencertown, New York shop. That village is 10 miles west of West Stockbridge, Massachusetts and 60 miles south of Uncle Wadsworth’s Cambridge, New York home.
So, finally my long search struck gold. Though there remain a few loose ends to connect, I believe Wadsworth Mayhew was the maker of my Conway chest and chairs. The Conway Historical Society chair, too. A Conway resident for a mere 15 years or less, his cryptic signature was Vineyard fishtails.