"Screwy feet": removable-feet chests of drawers from Chester County, Pennsylvania and Frederick County, Maryland
Date
1999
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
This thesis explores Chester County, Pennsylvania, and Frederick County, Maryland, removable-feet chests. The primary questions driving the investigation are: why did the builders of these chests decide to attach the legs to the bottoms of the cases with four wooden screws and what is the cultural meaning of this construction feature? The paper begins with description and the establishment of the form as a type, followed by the creation of context considering makers, owners, attribution, associations, mobility, written period documents, technology, construction, style, design and decoration, as well as previous twentieth-century scholarship of the form by Margaret and Herbert Schiffer. Other furniture studies, Robert F. Trent’s Hearts and Crowns and Robert Blair St. George’s Wrought Covenant, are consulted to see how the authors handled the limits of furniture scholarship. The dual definitions of vernacular architecture are applied to the investigation of the removable-feet chests, considering them as indigenous and local forms, part of a design tradition, as well as considering their cultural and practical functions as storage for household goods and as women’s dowry furniture. ☐ As folk furniture, the removable-feet chests are absent from the written record because their design was stored in the minds of the craftsmen who made them. The feet easily detach from the chest as does a frame. Whether they do so for ease of movement or because they were cost effective to build, we cannot say for sure. Both reasons may be simultaneously true. What was the significance of the C-scroll design in combination with a reeded, paneled, or lobed spade foot and the screw-joined legs? The form and decoration is distinctive to the trained eye, but to the casual observer, it is simply another plain, tall chest. As twentieth-century observers, we tend to think that something particularly distinctive, must have had a particular meaning in the past. However, we may never know why the removable-feet chests of Pennsylvania and Maryland were created.