Museum accessions.(Soap Hollow chest of drawers; tambour desk-and-bookcase; Herter Brothers cabinet acquired by museums)

Pennsylvania German artisans in Soap Hollow--a small valley in Somerset County in southwestern Pennsylvania so named from the soft soap made there--produced a recognizable body of painted furniture from about 1834 into the second quarter of the twentieth century. It is perhaps less well known than the painted furniture from the Schwaben Creek area of the Mahantongo Creek valley, but it has the distinction of being characterized by the frequent inclusion of the words "Manufactured by [maker's name]" (or variations of this wording) stenciled in a prominent position as part of the decorative scheme. This has allowed for the attribution, on the basis of similarities in decoration, of a large number of pieces to the five identified Soap Hollow makers: John Sala, Christian C. Blough, Jeremiah Stahl, Peter K. Thomas, and Tobias Livingston.

Illustrated below is a Soap Hollow chest of drawers recently acquired by the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, in neighboring Westmoreland County Attributed to Stahl, it is ornamented with pairs of stenciled birds, floral elements around the knobs, and frames around the keyhole escutcheons found on his signed pieces. As on several of Stahl's other chests of drawers, initials, presumably of the original owner, and a date, here 1867, are painted on one side. The top drawers are rounded on the front, as they are on others of Stahl's chests, and the backboard is exuberantly shaped to resemble breaking waves, typical of Soap Hollow chests.

Born on September 8, 1830, Stahl was listed as a carpenter with two children in the 1870 United States Census. He is known to have worked with Thomas prior to 1865, and their families both moved to Kent County Michigan, the Stahls in 1880.

There can be no greater satisfaction to a museum curator than to finally acquire an object that has been a gleam in the eye for decades. Such is the case with the labeled tambour desk-and-bookcase illustrated above, now safely in the Maine State Museum in Augusta. The contented curator is Ed Churchill, the museum's chief curator, who has tracked the secretary since the 1980s when he examined it at Mount Cuba, the house of the then owners, Mr. and Mrs. Lammot du Pont Copeland, in Wilmington, Delaware. When their estate was broken up last year, the museum made the winning bid at Sotheby's, New York, and the desk-and-bookcase came home to Maine, where it was made between about 1807 and 1810. The paper label inside the bookcase section declares, "MAHOGANY,/AND BIRCH FURNITURE/ [OF] ALL KINDS, AN]) OF THE ...