"The way we've always made it": the C. Dodge Furniture Company and the cabinetmaking industry of Manchester, Massachusetts
Date
1987
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
In the mid 1960s, the C. Dodge Furniture Company represented the last vestige of the once-thriving nineteenth-century furniture industry of Manchester, Massachusetts. The firm's last owner, Charles Dodge, operated on the same site and used many of the same tools and templates as did the company's founder in the 1840s. ☐ Providing services reminiscent of an "old-time" cabinetmaker, Dodge's firm came to represent both old-fashioned craftmanship and the virtues of an earlier American way of life. Dodge consciously emphasized this image by stressing his Yankee background and his firm's history, and by producing almost exclusively eighteenth- and nineteenth-century forms. ☐ The many records -- photographs, business ledgers, census and tax lists -- and the Dodge patterns and products available for study thus constitute the material remains of a Colonial Revival strategy which enabled the firm to survive into the mid-twentieth century despite a changing local economy and an age of mass-produced domestic furnishings.