Sideboard

Creator

Newell, Charles, ca. 1825-1910

Date

• ca. 1886

Summary

• Sideboard attributed to Charles Newell, Green Bay, ca. 1886. This walnut sideboard had three drawers with circular brass pulls and two glazed doors. Brass gallery on three sides of top. The shallow carvings and large decorative hinges are characteristic of the Eastlake-influenced furniture popular in the United States in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
• Born in New York in 1825, cabinetmaker Charles Newell came to Wisconsin in 1845. He worked as a carpenter and shipbuilder in Brown, Fond du Lac, and Dodge counties before settling permanently in Green Bay in 1869. As described in the Commemorative Biographical Record of the Fox River Valley Counties of Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago (1895), "he carrie[d] on a cabinet shop, doing desk and fine cabinet work of all kinds, chiefly expert work." This sideboard is among the furnishings in the dining room of Hazelwood Historic House Museum, Green Bay, Wisconsin, the former home of Morgan L. Martin (1805-1887), a prominent Wisconsin judge and politician. Martin's youngest daughter, Deborah Beaumont Martin (1858-1931) was a local historian, preservationist and librarian. According to the records of the Brown County Historical Society, she commissioned Newell to create this sideboard and a matching corner cupboard from an 1830s bedroom set that had passed down in the Martin family. In the twentieth century, this furniture was relocated to Purcellville, Virginia by another Martin descendant, but later returned to its original home in Green Bay.