August, 1919 
A LITTLE PORTFOLIO OF OLD INTERIORS 
The furniture of an old room is a sensitive index to the manner 
of men and women who lived in it. In the parlor pictured 
above you can read the history of our early New England fore¬ 
bears—forbiddingly sparse, simple as their living, stern as their 
creed. Some of the furniture they brought from the old coun¬ 
try; that which they made themselves follows the forms they 
knew at home. Thus did the heritage of furniture pass from 
England to America in Colonial days 
But if the parlor of the Colonial home was forbidding, the 
kitchen had an hospitable comeliness. The great dresser with 
its shelves of glistening pewter plates and tankards, the rows of 
wooden mixing bowls and pails, the stores hung up against the 
ceiling, the table simply set for the day’s meal—these things 
and their orderliness testify to the domestic habits of the early 
American housewife. These two rooms are in the Essex Insti¬ 
tute at Salem, Mass. 
