How Were The Cupboards Made?

The basic units of which the upper and lower cases are composed are frames made of stiles, rails, and panels. Stiles are the outermost vertical members, rails are horizontal members, and panels are thin, wide boards of wood held in grooves within the stiles and rails. Because lumber was relatively abundant in New England, it was often cheaper to split up oaks than to haul them to a sawmill. This process, call riving, involves splitting trees with iron and wooden wedges and big iron-bound mallets called beetles. The resulting pie-shaped wedges of wood were further reduced with a dull-edged tool called a froe and a rough wooden club called a maul. Because these rough pieces needed to be turned into lumber that was rectangular in cross-section, they were often trimmed on one broad side with a joiner’s hewing hatchet and then smoothed flat with planes. This is not to say that no sawn lumber was used in early New England. The cupboards have some pine, sycamore, and oak components that were sawn in water-powered sawmills. However, these boards were a less desirable alternative to riven parts, so they were used for secondary surfaces that got less attention, like shelves. Riving produced better material that was less likely to warp, because the splits followed the wood’s lengthwise fibers. Once the wood was prepared, it could be used for all the functional and decorative parts of the cupboards.