Sheraton two-drawer stand, probably from Fairfield County, Ohio, 1820 to 1840
The iconic images of the Midwest – the ever-moving pioneer, the isolated communities, the Mississippi River and all its tributaries – are the exact things that make Midwestern decorative arts such a challenge to study! With people always on the move and goods shifting up and down river communities and influencing tastes, finding enough “diagnostic features” to create an identified pool of objects and to make firm attributions is a challenge in many areas. These factors make the research being done in Fairfield County, Ohio all the more fascinating and important, because the findings there illuminate not only Lancaster, Ohio and the surrounding countryside, but also help shed a little light on many of the long-held ideas about the American Midwest.
On the Fairfield County, Ohio Decorative Arts website (http://www.fairfielddecarts.com), Deward Watts, a local independent researcher and collector, is piecing together his accumulated knowledge from years of ferreting out objects, tracking down genealogy, and sorting out local history. Focused on the craftsmen and artisans of the area and the objects they created prior to 1850, the site is organized into six categories: clock makers, furniture makers, gunsmiths, silversmiths, and weavers. Watts acknowledges that the lists are undoubtedly incomplete, but they include all those he’s uncovered in more than a decade of research and, whenever possible, objects from the makers are shown with the details of their personal histories that have been gleaned from newspapers and public records. What the site hopes to do is draw attention to the region’s decorative arts, to create a database of objects attributed to the region, and to hopefully allow others to use the resource to identify other Fairfield County objects.
Ohio jacquard coverlet. George Heilbronn, Lancaster, Fairfield County, 1852
The Prices4Antiques database includes a number of examples of the objects attributed to Fairfield County, Ohio, and quite likely, an even greater number of objects from Fairfield County for which no attribution has yet been made. And, through our sponsorship of the Midwest Antiques Forum, this sort of focused, independent research is exactly what we hope to encourage. Much of the area of Midwestern decorative arts remains a puzzle, but the work Watts and others are so passionately devoted to doing is certainly helping to put more pieces on the table!
-Hollie Davis, Senior Editor, p4A.com
