18th Century Wood
Bill Tindall, E.Tn.
The first settlers had virgin forest to choose furniture lumber from. However, these settlers were not able to take advantage of this timber to build fine furniture for their log homes. Later in time when cabinet makers were furnishing more substantial homes some astonishingly low grade lumber shows up in the early 1700's Chester County furniture.
The drawers for this piece were made from at best what we would call today #2 Common lumber . It may not be obvious from the low res picture but every drawer has a knot we would never include in a drawer. Some are 1.5" across. The top of the piece under discussion below was made from similarly knotty lumber.
Walnut is not a common tree and it would have been even less common in the virgin forests. Perhaps high quality logs were getting scarce at this time. Transporting a 1000 pound log much distance to a mill would have been a time consuming task. Or, the price of higher grade lumber was out of reach for country furniture, if lumber was sold by the board and not by the tree.
I have records of shop inventory of some Chester County shops. Wood is inventoried by species but no comment is ever made about quality of the walnut, cherry and other wood. It appears that shops maintained an inventory of lumber and did not rely on a lumber supplier to fill needs on a job by job basis. It is easy to speculate that shops just bought what a log yielded and used the result as best they could.