Joined Chest, 1699-1720

Joined chest with drawer carved with the name Sarah Strong.
Early 18th century. Oak and hard pine.

The name "Hadley chests" was given to this type of furniture by Henry Wood Erving (1851-1941), a Connecticut antique collector, who purchased a chest in Hadley, Massachusetts as an antique in 1883.  Erving wrote that "in talking with friends [he] always spoke of the first as my 'Hadley Chest,' a description others took up.”  The term “Hadley chest” became the accepted name for this type of furniture.

As Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes in The Age of Homespun, nearly every household owned an ordinary chest – six boards nailed at the corners with a hinged top.  More expensive chests were “built like a house” – made by a woodworker called a joiner using mortise and tenon joints to hold together rails and stiles fitted with panels.  The front side of the chest was commonly carved in low relief with a tulip and leaf pattern laid out in templates. Generally given to a young woman prior to her marriage, the chest was also commonly carved with her initials or name, usually using her maiden name.

The fleur-de-lis within octagonal shapes on the drawer front and the large four-petaled ornaments on the panels are common to five other chests with Northampton origins. The chest is therefore classified in Group 4: Northampton Type under Patricia Kane's classification of Hadley-type chests in "The Seventeenth-Century Furniture of the Connecticut Valley: The Hadley Chest Reappraised."  The maker used a variety of freehand carved motifs used as embellishments or fillers and tended to fill voids and compensate for poor spacing of lettering with an odd, calligraphic incised squiggle.

 Four of the Northampton chests are carved with the full name of the girl for whom they were made; two are carved with initials. The "Esther Cook" chest, the "Sarah Strong" chest, and the "Esther Lyman" chest were made for girls born in Northampton between 1695 and 1698, and the "Mary Burt" chest was made for a girl born in nearby Springfield in 1695.

The most likely original owner of this chest on the basis of birth date and Northampton origins is considered to be Sarah Strong born September 29, 1681.  Sarah was the daughter of Elder Ebenezer Strong of Northampton and Hannah Clapp. She married Thomas Stebbins on December 17, 1701.  Sarah Strong Stebbins and Thomas Stebbins had six children. The first two children were two daughters named Sarah, one born in 1703 and one in 1704, who died in infancy or at a very young age. Thomas Stebbins died in 1712. Sarah Strong Stebbins married a second time to Joseph Williston on November 6, 1714.  Sarah Strong Stebbins Williston and John Williston had one son, John, born May 6, 1715.

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