Museum accessions.

The early life of a region is so often reflected in the objects made there that regional museums are particularly excited to acquire pieces with strong local histories. Two such museums are represented here: Historic Deerfield, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, which has a nationally renowned collection of Connecticut River valley furniture and other decorative arts, and the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh, whose holdings deserve to be better known.

In the past year Historic Deerfield has acquired furniture ranging in date from the joined chest of about 1660 illustrated below, to the eighteenth-century desk illustrated at right, to a chest of drawers of about 1820 once owned by Mary Lyon, the founder of Mount Holyoke College in nearby South Hadley, Massachusetts.

The joined chest, which originally had a drawer that is now missing, represents a step in the evolution of design in the New World from the work of early English-trained craftsmen to what became a more indigenous style. It is attributed to Aaron Cook, who emigrated from Dorset in England, to Windsor, Connecticut, in 1636, had moved to Northampton, Massachusetts, by 1661, and subsequently lived in several western Massachusetts towns until his death in 1690. In its proportions and structure, the chest is clearly derived from late medieval English joined chests, and the carving on the side and front rails is also typical of English chests. In other elements, however, the chest deviates from English practice, including the deeply chamfered side panels that extend below the floorboards; the narrow, wedge-shaped stiles; and the shallow oak cleats attached to the edges of the yellow pine lid.

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Jonathan. Morton and Sarah Smith Morton of Hatfield, Massachusetts, were the original owners of the chest. She was the niece of Cook's fourth wife, Rebecca Foote Cook.

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Illustrated above is a slant-front desk made in Boston but owned in Deerfield by Dr. Thomas Williams, who moved to the town in 1739 from Newton, just outside Boston. The following year he married ...