Mission Furniture
Mission Furniture was the name given to the heavy fumed oak furniture popular from 1900 to about 1925 during the Arts and Crafts Period. Gustav Stickley was one of the major contributors and his pieces now bring extremely high prices. However, there were man other manufacturers, especially in the later years. In fact, his brothers and a host of others all competed against him.
We have collected catalogs from that era and will be featuring them on this site. They show several things I found surprising. Most obviously, a small down payment and time to pay was NOT a creation of the 1970's. It was alive and well in 1915 too. In those days a dollar down got a lot more of course.
Once we have this material published I think you will find that much of our "old" antique furniture was machine made and not the handcrafted items we sometimes think. The manufacturers in those days knew all the tricks for saving money and used them as much as possible.
However, it is still interesting to read and study the old catalogs. The level of detail and quality of the materials was very good. It is funny to read an author like Stickley "preaching" against the cheapening of materials when the sources being used were better than what we can buy now. Old growth timber has gotten very hard to find.