Category: Campaign Furniture

Teaching a new class is always terrifying exciting. This year, the class I am most excited about teaching is the Campaign Chest class May 6-10 at the Marc Adams School of Woodworking in Franklin, Ind.

I am, as you know, quite nuts for furniture in the campaign style and am eager to vomit forth all the research I’ve been doing on the design and construction of these chests. Plus, I’m eager to teach a class that focuses on a fine piece of furniture using excellent wood and outstanding hardware.

Most of the classes I teach focus on skills – as they should be. So the projects for those classes are designed around the skills and giving students lots of practice.

This class offers a lot of opportunity to build skills – full-blind dovetails, planing highly figured woods, complex hardware installation, fitting fine drawers – and the result is one of my favorite furniture forms.

Plus, we’ll have the full arsenal of machines, assistants and benches at our disposal at the school.

The last time I talked to Marc Adams, he said there are still a handful of spots available in the class. If you are interested in the class, you can read more about it here.

I’ve received several inquires from people asking if this class would be appropriate for a beginning woodworker. Answer: Absolutely. This is a class covering basic carcase construction and a blend of hand- and power-tool techniques.

— Christopher Schwarz

When I tell people I’m working on a book about “campaign furniture,” the response is usually complete confusion.

Is this, perhaps, the furniture used by presidential candidates on their tour buses?

Once I explain that it was the furniture used by colonials, government workers and military officers during 1790 to 1920, the response is usually utter revulsion.

Is this, perhaps, the furniture of oppression?

And so I just stop telling people I’m working on a book on campaign furniture and just tell them I’m doing a thing on birdhouses for bondage lovers and people who drink human blood.

Sometimes, however, I run into woodworkers who follow my work and have also stumbled onto pieces in this furniture style. They see its honest construction, its simple lines and its durability. It is furniture that is understated and fits in well in a wide variety of settings – many woodworkers have sent me photos of campaign chests they have encountered in Victorian, Arts & Crafts, period and contemporary homes.

So does campaign furniture have political baggage? The answer is: Who cares?

Every furniture style can be associated with something unsavory. Any piece of American furniture before 1860 can be labeled “the furniture of slavers.” Furniture before the 19^th Amendment was passed? Furniture of the people who hate women. Shaker? Furniture of people who despise reproduction. You can twist and contort history however you like. (A true history of any style of furniture is more complex than a blog entry can capture.)

Instead, I tend to focus on furniture’s form, its construction and its beauty. If we carry those things forward – and discard the retrograde social baggage associated with some (or all) furniture styles – we might just … I don’t know… find something interesting to build?

—   Christopher Schwarz

P.S. I’m in Australia for the next few weeks, where I hope to see some campaign furniture. If you’d like to see what I’m doing in Melbourne, check out my blog at Popular Woodworking Magazine here and here.

It’s not often that I’m thrilled to paw through another man’s garbage, but when that man is Frank David….

Teak is expensive stuff – upwards of $50/board foot at times. So every cut counts. And when it came time to buy stuff for the interior guts of this campaign chest, I was thinking of using walnut, pine or oak. But then I saw a magnificent pile of narrow teak offcuts while hunting through the stacks of lumber at Midwest Woodworking.

These pieces of 2-1/2”-wide, 4/4 rough stock were the leftovers from rip cuts made decades ago. Frank stashed them in the attic of his shop in Norwood, Ohio. Some of his employees asked if they could have these teak “rippers” to burn for firewood in their homes.

Frank merely raised an eyebrow at their request.

These rippers are perfect for web frames. So I purchased a few of these (at about $15/board foot) and built the two web frames for my latest campaign chest with them today.

Like all the other old pieces of teak from Midwest, this stuff is like a buttery dream (which is better than a wet dream but not as good as a lard dream) to work with. And I saved enough teak from my wide boards to scrounge just enough teak to make a copy of Napoleon’s desk for my book on campaign furniture.

Viva la refuse!

— Christopher Schwarz

Lately I’ve been getting hammered via e-mail because I’m using teak (Tectona grandis) to build my latest campaign chest for an upcoming book. The comments go something like this:

“Don’t you see the hypocrisy in publishing ‘With the Grain’ – a book that advocates using local species – and then using teak in your own project?”

It’s a fair question, and one I struggled with as I embarked on writing a book on campaign furniture. Furniture built in this style was made from a wide variety of tropical and domestic species, however most of the pieces I’ve encountered have been made from mahogany, teak, camphor and (less frequently) English oak.

When I started planning the projects for the book, I toyed with the idea of using domestic species for the projects – walnut, cherry and white oak for the most part. And while that’s an option I plan to present in the book, I decided to go with the historical species for building my projects.

It was a tough decision because I rarely use exotics. If you look at my published work since 1996, I think you’ll find the vast majority of my projects have been built with common domestic species, occasionally to the detriment of the project itself. Tansu made with sugar maple? Rice paper lanterns built with white oak? Workbenches built with Southern yellow pine?

This campaign chest would look wrong in shagbark hickory.

Exotics come with political baggage. And I dislike politics. Exotics are sometimes unethically harvested. They can be sold in a corrupt system that is unfair to workers and harmful to the environment and habitats. Now, I know that you can find 10 sides to this argument, and if you launch into this nuttiness in the comments below, I will close my eyes, put my hands over my ears and chant, “nunga, nunga, nunga.”

For me, the question was only this: Can I make something beautiful and enduring enough from these three boards to outlast the life span of this magnificent tree? To make the tree, in effect, nearly immortal?

This campaign chest is my own design, and yet it stands upon the shoulders of every chest I have studied and lived with since I was a child. The joinery is the best that I can do. The brasses I’ve purchased are older than I am. Though this isn’t the most technically challenging piece of furniture I’ve built, I am aiming for it to be my best.

So I walked into this project with my eyes open, knowing that the wood carried a high price – both in real and environmental terms. But I also knew that this chest was going to be one of the high points of my furniture-making to date.

I made my choice. And now you can make yours.

— Christopher Schwarz