Domestic Furnishings - Overview
Washboards, armchairs, lamps, and pots and pans may not seem to be museum pieces. But they are invaluable evidence of how most people lived day to day, last week or three centuries ago. The Museum's collections of domestic furnishings comprise more than 40,000 artifacts from American households. Large and small, they include four houses, roughly 800 pieces of furniture, fireplace equipment, spinning wheels, ceramics and glass, family portraits, and much more.
The Arthur and Edna Greenwood Collection contains more than 2,000 objects from New England households from colonial times to mid-1800s. From kitchens of the past, the collections hold some 3,300 artifacts, ranging from refrigerators to spatulas. The lighting devices alone number roughly 3,000 lamps, candleholders, and lanterns.
"Domestic Furnishings - Overview" showing 3 items.
1880 - 1900 The Closet Folding Bathtub
- Description
- With daily bathing becoming more accepted by the 1880s, many attempted to develop innovative ways to heat bath water and to incorporate the portable bathtub within a room setting. The Mosely Folding Bath Company advertised a folding bath in the 1895 Montgomery Ward Catalog. This tub, disguised as a mirrored wardrobe, folded down and out of its wood casing into the room, revealing the heater above.
- This was similar to Bruschke & Ricke’s combined sofa and bathtub of the same period. The sofa’s bolster concealed a water tank and heater, while the seat unfolded to reveal a bathtub. Often, large rubber aprons protected the wood or carpeted floor. Accounts of igniting sofas and burned bathers dampened the product’s appeal. Since neither bathtub attached to plumbing nor pipes, used bath water drained into a basin and then required emptying.
- For more information on bathing and bathtubs in the 19th and early 20th centuries, please see the introduction to this online exhibition.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1880-1900
- manufacturer
- Mosely Folding Bath Co.
- ID Number
- 1977.1217.13
- catalog number
- 1977.1217.13
- accession number
- 1977.1217
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
1830 - 1850 Boat Shaped Bathtub
- Description
- Nineteenth–century bathtubs were viewed as furniture rather than fixtures. As such, tin tubs were often decorated with painted stripes and swags or marbleized to imitate wood. This tub, with its multicolored stripes around the top edge and its painted wood stand, would fit appropriately among the other "fancy" household furniture of the period. This tub likely was used in a dressing room or bedroom.
- For more information on bathing and bathtubs in the 19th and early 20th centuries, please see the introduction to this online exhibition.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1830 - 1850
- maker
- unknown
- ID Number
- DL*68.0723
- catalog number
- 68.0723
- accession number
- 275377
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center
1840 - 1846 Hat Bathtub
- Description
- The tub takes its name from its form in the shape of a hat. The patient sat either on the bath’s ledge or on a chair outside the tub with his or her feet and legs in the center of the basin. The Dover Stamping Company, a tinware firm in Boston, Massachusetts, listed this form as such in their 1869 catalog. The spout for emptying the bath water is beneath the ledge.
- We know of Nathaniel Waterman, the tub’s maker, through his membership in the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association and his listings in the Boston City Directories at 85 Cornhill Street from 1842 to 1846. He learned the tinsmith trade at a young age and his firm, the Waterman Kitchen and House Furnishing Wareroom, existed in Boston for over forty years. According to accounts, his store was a “veritable museum of all conceivable household necessities and conveniences.”*
- For more information on bathing and bathtubs in the 19th and early 20th centuries, please see the introduction to this online exhibition.
- *Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association. Annals of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, 1795–1892. (Boston: Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 1892): p. 100.
- Location
- Currently not on view
- date made
- 1840 - 1846
- maker
- Waterman, Nathaniel
- ID Number
- DL*68.0724
- catalog number
- 68.0724
- accession number
- 275377
- Data Source
- National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center