The Smallest State Has a Rich History of Furniture Makers

The catalog describes reversals of fortune and tragic fates. Apprentices at workshops that went bankrupt ended up in rags and in court with their former employers. Eunice Hazard, one of the Goddards’ regular customers, was left impoverished after the Revolutionary War with seven children; her husband had sympathized with the British and eventually fled to Canada.

In the Yale galleries, some open furniture drawers will reveal faded handwriting. Videos will show modern carvers working on shells, claw feet and drawer dovetails. Musical clocks, which have been analyzed by the historian and dealer Gary R. Sullivan, will be kept in melodious working order. (Mr. Sullivan’s book “Musical Clocks of Early America 1730-1830,” written with the music historian Kate Van Winkle Keller, will be published early next year by the Willard House & Clock Museum in North Grafton, Mass.)

The Yale exhibition and the Rhode Island Furniture Archive database are part of a growing number of tightly focused regional furniture studies.

“Quaker Made: Vermont Furniture 1820-1835,” a show at the Rokeby Museum in Ferrisburgh, Vt., through Oct. 30, focuses on works and ledger books from Stephen Foster Stevens, a Quaker artisan. The Classical Institute of the South in New Orleans is developing a database of furniture and artworks made in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi before the Civil War.

Hal Stuart, an independent scholar in Bowling Green, Va., has homed in on armless seats for a recent book, “Virginia Sectional Furniture: 1800-1860.” In scouring private collections and museums, he found about 40 of the sectional seats, which could be arranged in rows or angled configurations. He has also researched the best-known makers of the furniture, the Green brothers in Alexandria, who converted one of their buildings into a military hospital during the Civil War. (Their story helped inspire the public television series “Mercy Street.”)

Historic New England in Boston has digitized the archives of the Boston furniture designers Albert H. Davenport, Charles R. Irving and Robert Casson. An essay collection, “Boston Furniture, 1700-1900,” due early next year from the Colonial Society of Massachusetts/University of Virginia Press, examines topics like piano makers, Queen Anne chairs and the contents of the politician Thomas Hutchinson’s house, which was looted in 1765.