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This 19th-century piece was designed to safeguard a then-precious commodity. Not so long ago, obtaining sugar wasn’t easy. It’s difficult to believe that the commodity we have in almost [...]

This antebellum free black man was the most successful cabinetmaker in North Carolina. My introduction to Thomas Day came in 1998 on a shopping trip to High Point, N.C., for a bed. I stumbled [...]

Discovered in a museum basement, this Piedmont design makes heads turn. This article originally appeared in the August 2013 issue of Popular Woodworking. My first trip to the Museum of Early [...]

This North Carolina beauty exemplifies the style of the early South. I don’t consider myself a furniture snob, but until recently, I’d not studied furniture from the South beyond pieces featured [...]

I get a fair amount of finishing questions. Recently, most questions that come my way ask how to finish a project that has inlay without heavily affecting the contrast between the project wood [...]

Since Bob Lang and I returned from our scouting trip for potential book projects at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, I have had the opportunity to build a few southern projects. A [...]

Woodworking is not a difficult endeavor. It’s not, really. It is woodworkers that make it difficult. Over-thinking and sweating the small stuff causes us to pause, or even stop. It’s [...]

Over on the Chris Schwarz blog, some of the people commenting on his review of Furniture in the Southern Style mentioned one of the photos in the introduction, and the reference to it being a [...]

As a lifelong Southerner, I can attest that things are done a little differently below the Mason-Dixon line. Things might seem a little backward or slow to newcomers. The manners, the way you do [...]

Today, I picked up desk copies of “Furniture in the Southern Style: 27 Shop Drawings of Furniture from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts” – which is great news because that [...]

When I build a reproduction, I try to remain as faithful as I can to the construction of the original – even if my modern brain says it’s not ideal. The original builder of this early [...]

Early American furniture has been widely studied, but through a narrow lens. Typical museum pieces seen today were not found in typical homes, and there