North Carolina Tall Chest, ca. 1800
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GUEST:
I started collecting furniture because I needed to furnish a home, and it has been the hobby of a lifetime. I started in the '60s. I would start with a full pocketbook and an empty van, and I usually came home when the pocketbook was empty.
APPRAISER:
Well, this is a North Carolina tall chest. It's walnut primary wood, yellow pine secondary, and it probably dates to around 1790, 1800, 1810. A piece like this tells the story of Germanic cabinet making traditions, because the first place that you usually see these coming from is in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and then the people that were Germanic settlers came down the great wagon road, and the next place that you see them is in the valley of Virginia. And the place where I've seen them the most is down in North Carolina. And the first thing that attracted me to them was the fact that they had these nice arches in the drawer tops. And one of the things that I wanted everybody to see was the fact that on this side, you can see where the moldings repeat themselves.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
On the sides.
GUEST:
That attracted me to it, too. Yeah, and the fact that it's so vertical.
APPRAISER:
It's got fluted quarter columns.
GUEST:
Yes, yes.
APPRAISER:
Which is a nice formal characteristic.
GUEST:
Yes.
APPRAISER:
And the other thing that you always look for in Southern furniture that I don't think everybody thinks about that much, is the fact that it's very overconstructed.
GUEST:
What do you mean by "overconstructed"?
APPRAISER:
Well, look how heavy the secondary wood is.
GUEST:
Oh, yes, it's like lead.
APPRAISER:
I'll say, when you have to pick this thing up, it gets real heavy.
GUEST:
It does.
APPRAISER:
And the other thing that tipped me off-- and I want to show everybody this real quick-- are these reinforcing pieces.
GUEST:
I've never seen anything like that.
APPRAISER:
They come all the way through the chest. And it's over reinforced all the way around. It's got great big glue blocks up under the feet, which has kept the feet from breaking off through the years. And it creates... it gives you a nice sense of what these cabinetmakers were doing, how their own interpretation of it was. And that's some of the things that we look for when we think about an item being from the South versus being from New England or Pennsylvania.
GUEST:
So you think this is a Southern piece?
APPRAISER:
Oh, absolutely. Did you not say that the family came from North Carolina?
GUEST:
North Carolina, yes. But the family also went up to New England and Pennsylvania to shop.
APPRAISER:
Without a doubt it's mid-Atlantic. My feeling is that it's a Southern chest of drawers. It was made in North Carolina.
GUEST:
Oh, my goodness.
APPRAISER:
And on a scale of one to ten, that sort of takes you into the rarity thing, because there's much less quantity of these types of chests in the South than there would be in Pennsylvania. Why don't you tell everybody what you paid for it?
GUEST:
Well, I paid between $2,200 and $2,600, and this was in 1988.
APPRAISER:
1988.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
Hmm. We talked amongst ourselves, the other appraisers at the furniture table, and as far as we're concerned, conservatively, in my opinion, this chest is worth $12,000 to $18,000.
GUEST:
How wonderful.
Appraisal Details
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