Featured Vintage Cedar Chest- seeking information

Hello everyone,

Recently, my mother gave me her hope chest, which is made out of cedar. I remember this chest being both at my house growing up and at my grandparents’ house. I assumed that it had been purchased in the late 50s or early 60s as that would have been when my mother would have been in her mid teens. I started looking at it when I got home, and it made me think it may have been put together from a kit.



I called and asked for more information, and mama told me that the chest had belonged to her great-grandfather’s older sister, who was born in 1875. I’m guessing she got married around 1900 or a little before, which would make the chest no less than 121 years old.

I’ve wiped the outside and inside down with clean, damp cloths.



A couple of nails and screws have gone AWOL, but it seems solid overall.




I can’t find any maker’s marks anywhere. All I could find were these two stamps:



That’s all I know. Can someone help out by providing additional information if they have it?

Thank you,
-William

 

I have my grandmother's hope chest, not quite so old as yours. As you wrote in your intro, they're useful things.

The people who know furniture around here are going to want to see more of how the chest is constructed. This might involve turning the chest on its lid.

 

What a charming piece ! Ive seen many of them,but this has to be the prettiest. Id say you were spot on date wise .

 

Is that a "self-latching push button lock", that engages when the lid is closed? I know Lane started using them in 1912, and are still replacing them with so called "safety locks".

 

Here are some pics of the bottom:









As far as the lock goes, it’s just an ordinary key lock. No push button. I don’t have the key.

Thank you,
-William

 

JMHO.
stamps give it away. crude sawing as well. most probably Asian import.

 

From what I have seen, it has the look of a Jacob Bloom, but no identifying marks. It seems like there is very little information on the Jacob Bloom Company that's easily found. I also thought it could have been ordered from the Sears catalog. My family used to have a reproduction of a Sears catalog from the mid-1890s, but it appears to have gotten away, so there's no way for me to check and see if Sears was selling hope chests in their catalog at that time.

On top of that, I think I was looking at the wrong sister when I typed the original posting. One of the ancestry databases was incomplete. The sister who may have owned this chest was born in 1861. My great-great grandfather was born in 1880. It would make sense that a woman with the name Margaret Elizabeth could be known as "Mamie," and that's the name my mother used when she told me about the chest's history. Mamie died in 1922. My great-grandmother, who was alive until I was 11, was born in 1903 and was married around 1920. It's possible that the chest was given to her to use as a hope chest, and that she passed it to my grandmother, who would have in turn given it to my mother.

I have a couple of other vintage pieces where it seem almost providential that they made their way to me, because their pathway to my possession was anything but straight and simple.

Thank you,
-William

 

I did try to bring the whole bottom of the chest into focus, but fear I wasn't very successful.....possibly others won't need it.....as your other images seem to be nicely IN focus!!

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This fits. I do not think it belonged to the older relative. Chest is late teens-20s in style so was probably new then.

 

HAHAHAHA!!! Well, don't laugh, but I just HAPPEN to have a REPRO 1902 Edition of the Sears & Roebuck Catalog!!! WHICH I went through page by page, to see if it would help....as they had E V E R Y T H I N G under the sun available for mail order back then!!! But sorry, NO luck!! BUT it WAS FUN going through it.....think my parents gave it to us back about 35 years ago!!!! (Side note from inside....the Smallest salaries paid back in 1902 at Sears was $35.00 per month!!!)

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Ok, so no cedar chests in the 1902 Sears catalog lol. That seems a little surprising given some of the other stuff they would ship, but maybe they hadn't figured out how to do it without the chest incurring damage during the trip.

I think we had a repro from the mid 1890s and/or the one you have, and then one from the early 1920s. Back like I said in a previous posting, we read them to tatters and they all appear to have gotten away.

As far as my chest goes, I just have a hard time doubting what my mother has said about the chest's origins. Family lore can sometimes go down the wrong pathway, but that seems unlikely here given that several of the people I've mentioned were still alive within her memory, and a few were alive within mine. Sadly, those who would have known best have been gone for a long time.

 

No wood or cedar chests shown in the fall 1900 repro Sears catalog that I have. They do show some travel trunks but not storage chests.

 

SAME with mine, Bluumz!!

 

And, sadly, that happens to all of us!!

 

This really surprises me since Sear's would ship all manner of things, including the big & bulky, and having a hope chest was such a 'thing'. Question is when did it becomes a thing?

Hope chests were given to high school age girls for them to safeguard all the sheets, pillow cases, tea towels, etc., that they were embroidering in hope of their eventual marriage. I have my grandmother's hope chest, which is a more conventional, legless, cedar chest. My grandmother was born in 1896. If she was given it when she was about 16, that puts it to c. 1912. It has just occurred to me that it may have been handed down to her by one of her older sisters, of which she had 6. I find it hard to imagine that as the children of a small farmer each one of them would have had her own. But who knows. Maybe it was not such a fad when the older sisters were the appropriate age. There is no family story of its having been handed down from someone in the generation before.

 

If the information I have is correct, the sister who is believed to have owned the chest was the oldest, so it makes sense for her to have had one. What's a little dicey is knowing whether or not the chest is old enough for someone who would have been married in the 1880s or 1890s. The website familysearch.org doesn't show her as even being part of the family. The family patriarch appears to have had more than one wife, which wasn't altogether unusual in that time given that childbirth and disease could take their toll. So, the man appears to have had at least two daughters by one wife and then eight more children, my great-great grandfather included, by the second wife.

I asked my mother about it again, and mentioned that the person who might have owned the chest has a death-date in 1922, and she said that doesn't seem right because her mother said the person didn't die 'til the early 30s and was alive within her memory. I found another sister who was four years younger that died in the late 40s. She had a name that also could have become "Mamie," but the dates don't seem quite right. Mama said she had no idea...

As far as the second wife and all of those children go, one girl must have died in infancy. Another one died when she was around one year old when she got hold of a piece of flypaper and ate it during a moment of lax supervision, and then there was one last sister who was born in 1886 and died in 1961.

All this to find out more about a cedar chest... This must be how it gets started for some people. A funny thing makes them think about family and then they're off on the life-long quest to find out all they can. Sort of like leaving the Shire to find the One Ring To Rule Them All... It's not that I didn't care before, but I thought those people telling the stories would be around forever, and that simply wasn't the case. It's an easy trap to fall into when several of them live into their 90s, but not all of them were all that interested in that sort of history, so they only knew so much.

Edit: I have since found out that the daughter whom I thought died in infancy actually didn't She lived 'til 1934, which fits the narrative, though not perfectly. She was older than my g-g-grandfather, and 1934 would have been the year my grandmother turned 13, so that fits the part of the story about her being alive 'til my grandmother was in her teens

 

If you ever get this sorted, or come to a few plausible possibilities, don't forget to write them down & put the info with the chest.

 

Yeah, that's a good idea.

Guess it's time to get back on topic. We may have milked the best of the brains here in this forum, but I still would like to find out more regarding the chest and its manufacture. I'll keep looking for information as well, and I'm hoping for an "a-ha" moment.

Thank you,
-William

 

Cedar chests from the 1922 Sears, Roebuck catalog:




~Cheryl

 

Thank you. Is this the first year that cedar chests show up in the catalog, or do we know?
Most of these appear to have casters, and mine doesn't. Several are pretty close, but none are dead on target.
As an aside, someone on the local marketplace was selling a chest that looked alot like IH7355 on that catalog page. They were adverting it as a 50s chest, but even my untrained eyes knew it was much older. It needed some repair work.
One the subject of repair, I'll have some questions about that shortly.

Thank you,
-William