Shaker Furniture, Part II: Faith in Form
The Shaker desire for order included the efficient use of wall space. Valuable interior space was not wasted on closets. Pegs lined the walls of the personal quarters, meeting rooms and shops. These accommodated clothing, clocks, cupboards, and even chairs when not being used. The Shakers adapted their blanket boxes and chests from earlier colonial types. They served as storage chests in "retiring rooms", and smaller boxes and baskets kept personal items and tools in organized fashion.
In determining the shape and design of furniture, only function and essential needs were considered, which did not include unnecessary molding or carving, but color was not always missing. Some fine pieces today show original red or blue paint. Yellow and green were also commonly used. Typical chairs were straight-backed with slats, perhaps a straight rail across the top to hold a shawl, or to hang the chair on a peg. Seats were often simply woven with cotton tape in a checkerboard pattern. Chairs could be made with seats of varying width, armless to enable sewers and knitters to move freely, and either low enough to slide under a trestle table or high enough to use at counters and looms.
The oval box, one of today's most recognizable "Shaker" style, was manufactured in many sizes for storage of sewing, knitting, woodworking or writing tools, and exemplify the Shaker insistence on nothing less than perfection. They have a simple overlapping joint resembling a "swallowtail", held together by tiny dowels or copper tacks. Open weave flat-bottomed baskets designed to drain cheeses, could also hold bread or linens or fresh-cut flowers. Firkins, or lidded buckets with handles, are also simply shaped and functional.
Shelves with pegs could also be suspended from other wall-mounted pegs. Thus they could be moved to another useful location at will. Chests of drawers, with symmetry and grace, lined the walls of workrooms along with simple desks, washstands, trestle tables, benches and stools. Sewing stands were equipped with drawers which could slide from either side as two sisters worked on a project together. Beds had casters or rollers so that they could be moved easily for making up or rearranging the room. Simple pegs formed drawer pulls, replacing the brasses and escutcheons of "worldly" furniture.
Tinware was another product of Shaker inventiveness. The hogscraper candleholder was a slender black iron candlestick. Its name derived from its dual use as a tool in the scraping of scalded
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