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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Antiqueguy19001, post: 2308347, member: 8465&quot;]A few days ago I was at the dump and saw this old secretary desk in a pile of scrap wood that was likely going to get taken to landfill pretty soon. Unfortunately, it was clearly thrown onto the edge of the pile pretty hard, and had a good amount of damage and had many pieces scattered all around it that I had to collect. There was crudely cast and clearly somewhat hand carved after casting metal decoration on the top of the desk that I mostly recovered, though there is a small section of it that I still haven&#039;t retrieved, I looked for it again at the dump today, but wasn&#039;t able to, though at least I was able to retrieve the last metal knob it was missing, other than that, it is 100% complete. The metal decoration I was able to find isn&#039;t shown in the photos unfortunately. A bit of veneer was missing, and from what veneer I could recover, I was able to glue some back on, though what was missing I was able to stain for now, until I can fix it better, it&#039;s hard to notice unless you know where to look though. Except for the small area of wood by the lower door that was completely frayed and splintered up, that required some work to even reattach the bottom left door. It was basically a basket case at first though, with many pieces of wood that needed to be carefully glued, though now it is a very beautiful piece of furniture that I am proud to have in the house. It makes me sad though to know that such a beautiful historic piece was treated with such disrespect and was destined for landfill if I didn&#039;t save it.</p><p><br /></p><p>What I&#039;m curious about though is approximately what the age of this piece is, it appears similar to some Georgian era pieces, and it certainly seems to have that age from what I see on it. Everything on it appears to be handmade, down to the brass keyhole cover on the top that has a clearly hand cut design. Nothing is really symmetrical on it either, with the two long drawers not being the same height. Each small brass hinge is extremely crude and look to be fairly handmade. The lock on the main desk part appears to be British, with a crude English coat of arms etched into it. I&#039;m also wondering though if this piece is British or American though, perhaps the locks were exported and the piece was crafted in America. It&#039;s also not very tall either (maybe a little over three feet tall), and less wide than most secretary desks I see on Google. I also haven&#039;t seen any pieces with the two doors on the bottom that mine has. Also, what wood does it appear to use, and what type of wood is the veneer appear to be. The veneer is also very thick compared to the veneer I&#039;ve seen being used on furniture from around the Civil War era.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258956[/ATTACH]</p><p>The desk after some fixing up</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258957[/ATTACH]</p><p>The inside of the desk, with velvet likely added much later</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258958[/ATTACH]</p><p>The inside of one of the main drawers</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258959[/ATTACH]</p><p>The dovetails on one of the main drawers</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258960[/ATTACH]</p><p>The dovetails on one of the small drawers inside the desk when you open the top</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258961[/ATTACH]</p><p>The bottom of a drawer, I think it might be a photo of one of the small ones from inside of the desk.</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258962[/ATTACH]</p><p>The dovetails of another one of the small drawers inside the desk when you open it</p><p>[ATTACH=full]258963[/ATTACH]</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Thanks for the help![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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