Earlywood: Furniture for Losers

Publisher’s note: But Earlywood, which we offer weekly, is for winners. Every Saturday, we publish a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog post. This one is from January 2019. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. We hope you enjoy it.

In our competitive society, the winners get to name the things. This is true with battles, large social movements and even furniture styles.

I think there is value in trying to think of these issues from the perspective of others – the losers, if you will. When growing up in Arkansas, some teachers taught us about the Civil War. Others taught us about the War of Northern Aggression.

If you think divergent taxonomy couldn’t apply to furniture, I disagree. About 15 years ago I worked with a guy who studied Kentucky Style furniture. When I suggested that the pieces looked like Western Shaker furniture wi…