Description: Pine and oak cupboard or livery cupboard with a turned six-spindle gallery top. The cupboard has two plain doors held by the original butterfly iron hinges over four shelves. Dean Fales notes that "livery cupboards were designed originally with various types of openings so that air could circulate for proper food storage. The term appears in Massachusetts inventories as early as 1655, and that there are several seventeenth-century examples known...Th[is] cupboard is from the Thomas Hailer house, constructed in 1717 in West Newbury, Massachusetts. The cupboard was built under a beam sometime in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it has a closed top, so that the turned spindles form a decorative rather than practical grille." The word "livery" may stem from "delivery" as the shelves could be used to hold each person's food rations for the day (from W. Nutting).
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