Discovering identity of Colonial craftsman
For decades they have enthralled and perplexed curators and collectors alike: ornate, Revolutionary-era chests of drawers and desks with bookcases made with a level of precision and detail that spoke of the wealth of their owners and the mastery of their builder.
The identity of the Massachusetts furniture maker who fashioned these rare 18th-century artifacts had remained an enigma of history, until now.
An archival treasure hunt by two amateur researchers from the North Shore has unlocked a centuries-old secret and solved the mystery of the author of a handful of masterpieces of late Colonial craftsmanship: one of the preeminent builders of high-end, 18th-century furniture, Nathaniel Gould of Salem.
The researchers' investigation of brittle documents, aided by a breakthrough discovery using that most modern of tools, a Google search, has revealed the intimate story of a national treasure passed down through generations and opened a window into the daily lives of people in Boston and Salem before and during the Revolutionary War.
Today, the Massachusetts Historical Society will announce the researchers' locating of the long-forgotten records that made these discoveries possible: three ledger books belonging to Gould, also a merchant who sold goods like corn and coffee, describing in detail his business operations for most of the years from 1758 to his death in 1781.
"It's opened a window into that time," said Peter Drummey, libarian for the society. "We know a lot about the political history. Now we're starting to see a three-dimensional view of that society."
Solving the puzzle of who made the furniture is also "giving us a much greater understanding of life at the top of the economic scale," said one of the researchers, Kemble Widmer of Newburyport, who has studied Salem furniture for two decades. "It's identified positively a superior craftsman, it tells us how he did business, and it gives us an idea of how ornately the very, very wealthy decorated their homes."
Widmer's search began when a Pennsylvania antique dealer asked him and Joyce King of Wakefield, who has long studied Salem history, to trace the origin of the 18th-century desk and bookcase he had acquired.
The opulent attributes of the artifact - the detailed design of the feet, the bonnet top, the expensive mahogany wood, the decoration on the top of the board, the distinctively carved shell of the center drop - were characteristics shared by a handful of furniture pieces known to have been made in Salem.
But the only existing evidence of Gould's connection to the work was a signature on a block-front desk and bookcase on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Next to Gould's signature, however, someone had scribbled the phrase "not his work."
That contradiction led to decades of debate over whether Gould had fashioned furniture pieces of similar style, the rarest of which are worth more than a million dollars, Widmer said. By the 1970s, many scholars agreed another Salem cabinet maker, Henry Rust, was the author of the items.
King and Widmer started their search in January 2007.
"We knew that Gould existed, that he was the furniture maker for the wealthiest families," Widmer said Wednesday, behind the heavy carved oak doors in the Georgian Revival brick-and-stone headquarters of the Massachusetts Historical Society on Boylston Street.
Widmer and King spent months trying to link the antique dealer's piece to Salem. After scouring archives of inventories and wills, they discovered that ancestors of the previous owners were related to the Cabot family of Salem.
Then, in February 2007, King decided to Google Gould's name.
The search revealed that the Massachusetts Historical Society owned documents belonging to Gould, donated by his lawyer, Nathaniel Dane, in 1835. The society had been compiling a computer database of its 12 million pages of documents for a decade, but the data had only a month or two earlier become available to public search engines like Google.
To society historians, Dane, who later became an important figure in early American legal history, had always been the focus of interest. His list of Gould's personal possessions when the furniture maker died in 1781 - including such items as 180 gallons of Madeira, valued at 54 pounds, a house lot valued at 97 pounds, and a total estate worth the wealthy sum of 664 pounds - was always regarded as a cultural curiosity. No one paid much attention to Gould's ledgers.
But when King saw the society's reference to the ledgers online, she e-mailed Widmer: "This may be important."
The two rushed to the archives, where they found the three vellum-covered ledgers, with Gould's neat cursive on pages browned by time, describing in minute detail his sales, listing his customers, and the circumstances of the transactions.
"I thought, 'Hallelujah, we've found the Rosetta Stone of furniture research,' " Widmer recalled. "It was hiding in plain sight."
Using the ledgers, they were able to trace Gould's sale of a desk and bookcase, which matched the description of the signed piece in the Metropolitan Museum, to Jeremiah Lee, a prominent Marblehead merchant, on April 9, 1775, 10 days before the Shot Heard 'Round the World. One of the ledgers showed that Lee had paid 135 pounds, 3 shillings, and 4 pence for the desk and bookcase and other furniture, which had been prepared for travel by ship.
Another ledger showed that Lee had purchased a shipment totaling the same amount "to sundrey household furniture for his daughter," who had married a prominent shipping merchant in Newburyport. When her husband died in 1796, the desk and shelves were on the his belongings list . But when she died in the early 1800s, the furniture was not among her belongings.
The origin of the signed piece at the Met had always been a mystery. Documents had traced it only to a merchant from Newburyport who had purchased it sometime before 1820 at an auction. When Widmer and King used Gould's records to trace the sale to Lee and to his daughter in Newburyport, they made the connection.
"That is the Met bookcase," Widmer said Wednesday, pointing at the entry in Gould's ledger.
The discovery delighted curators of American decorative arts, who rarely get to see mysteries solved with such unequivocal documentation.
"It's terribly exciting," said Morrison Heckscher, chairman of the American Wing at the Metropolitan Museum. "How often to you get documents to identify an object that old?"
A four-drawer bombé desk at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that had been attributed to Salem furniture makers will probably be attributed to Gould based on the discovery, said Gerry Ward, senior curator of American decorative arts.
The ledger books and examples of the furniture of Nathaniel Gould will be on exhibit at the Massachusetts Historical Society in February.
Drummey expects historians to further explore the insights into Revolutionary society provided by the ledgers. They detail Gould's sales of corn, molasses, coffee, and furniture to loyalists and patriots alike.The ledgers revealed that Gould sold furniture to General Thomas Gage, the British military governor of Massachusetts, but also to prominent patriot families.
"Here's a small businessman trying to make his way in the world, the Revolution comes along, and there's this crushing inflation," Drummey said. "Prices were increasing tenfold in a matter of months."
King marveled at the lucky break that led to their discovery.
"It's amazing," she smiled, "what's on the internet."
David Filipov can be reached at filipov@globe.com 