Rustic Racks (Book Three, Card 17)

Several American companies specialized in rustic furniture in the 1870s. In the Adirondack Mountains of New York, high-quality rustic furniture was created for wealthy city dwellers’ woods cottages. The Adirondack chair is the most well-known modern example of this type. Chairs, love seats, tables, desks, smoking stands (sometimes with a cabin on top), clocks, chests of drawers, rockers, coat racks, mirror frames, beds, and lamps are examples of rustic furniture. Willow, hickory, mountain laurel, and Alaska cedar were among the many wood species used. Palm fronds were occasionally used in the American South. We continue to locate and learn about a subset of antique rustic furniture manufactured by Native Americans in the United States and First Nations groups in Canada. For ages, North American native peoples have converted natural materials into useful products for housing, transportation, clothing, storage, and other necessities of everyday life, as shown in the photo above of Ojibwe bark teepees and a bark canoe. Native peoples’ ability to rely on what nature gives enabled them to employ those materials in innovative ways as they adapted to non-Indian cultural situations.