Before the industrial revolution introduced "manufactured" furniture, craftsmen in America were making some of the most beautiful, well-proportioned, and tastefully decorated furniture that had ever been made. That dedication to craftsmanship never died, and it lives today in the hands of American period furniture makers. Here is where we meet.
SAPFM is a volunteer-run, non-profit educational organization. Members include working professionals, hobbyists, museum curators, collectors, historians, instructors, and a number of people who hold more than one of those at once. What they share is a working interest in American period furniture — the techniques, the proportions, the woods, the regional schools, the makers — and a willingness to do the work themselves.
If this kind of work interests you and you've found your way here, stay and learn. Information about the craft and its history is spread very thin. The Society gathers it — at meetings and conferences, and in the pages of the journal and the magazine.
It's education, in the end — passed by teachers, by mentors, and by the maker at the next bench. There is no other organization with quite this purpose, particularly in the context of the makers' movement.
Compared to the periods of furniture we build, SAPFM is much younger. The Society was founded in January 1999 when Steve Lash and Mickey Callahan, sitting at the same table at the Working Wood in the 18th Century conference in Williamsburg, decided the craft deserved a society of its own. By the end of the year, SAPFM was incorporated.
More than twenty-five years on: twenty-two chapters, two publications, a national conference each year, the Cartouche Award, and the quiet network underneath it all.
Each year the Society recognizes an individual whose achievements best reflect SAPFM's mission. The Cartouche Award acknowledges craftsmen, educators, conservators, and supporters — professional or hobbyist — who have inspired or instructed others, or who have simply made the world more pleasing as a result of their skillful labors. The recipient is honored at the Cartouche Award Banquet at the Society's Conference.
The award is named for the actual bronze cartouche from which the trophy is cast — a Philadelphia tall case clock built by Gene Landon, the 2003 recipient. The bronze is cast by Dana Stewart in Lambertville, NJ. The base is mahogany, made by SAPFM founder Mickey Callahan.
More than a quarter-century in, and the next is wide open.
