Hannahs Walnut Oval Pie Crust Occasional Table, Kenosha, c. 1920–1935

The Piece

An oval occasional table with a carved scalloped edge, standing on four reeded turned legs braced by an X stretcher, and carrying its maker's paper label and factory model number on the underside.

The top is the reason to own it. It is laid in walnut veneer, quarter matched so the figure runs out from a centre cross and meets itself four ways, with a crossbanded border worked round the outside. The oval is then cut into a scalloped pie crust edge, carved in a running wave of lobes with a moulded lip, so the outline changes shape as you walk round it.

The edge and the apron are finished dark, almost black in the hollows of the carving, and rubbed back on every high point to a warm gold. Whoever finished it wanted the moulding to read as relief rather than as a line, and it does.

Beneath, a reeded apron runs the full oval and drops into square blocks at the four legs. The legs are turned, gently tapered, and reeded down their whole length, with a ring turning at the top and a small turned foot. An X stretcher of moulded section runs corner to corner with a turned boss at the crossing, which is both the brace and the prettiest detail on the piece.

Turn it over and the factory is still there: a stencilled 3574 and a paper label under it. The screws holding the top down sit in brass cup washers, slotted heads, not a Phillips among them.

History & Provenance

The label reads HANNAHS, in a shield with a script h, over Quality Furniture, Trade Mark Reg. U.S. Pat. Off., Kenosha, Wis. U.S.A. Above it the model number 3574 is stencilled straight onto the wood.

Hannahs Manufacturing Company of Kenosha, Wisconsin was a table works. Not a general furniture factory that also made tables, a specialist: their trade catalogues are titled Hannahs Tables, and Catalogue 35 was issued in 1923 with another following in 1929. Catalogue numbering that high means a long run of issues behind it. The company appears in the Kenosha History Center's record of the city's lost industries, which is to say the works are gone and the name went with them.

What survives is the product, and this is a good example of it. A quarter matched veneered top with a crossband border, a hand finished carved edge, reeded legs turned to match and a moulded X stretcher with a turned boss is a specialist's work. A general factory making a hundred forms does not reed four legs the full length or cross a stretcher with a turned centre.

The dating rests on three things together. The registered trademark label and the stencilled model number place it in Hannahs's catalogued production, which the surviving trade catalogues put squarely in the 1920s. The form is Colonial and Georgian Revival occasional furniture, a style that ran hard from the middle teens into the 1930s and then fell away. And every screw in the piece is slotted and seated in a brass cup washer, with no Phillips head anywhere; the Phillips drive arrived in 1936 and spread through American furniture production after it, so its complete absence sits as a soft ceiling rather than a hard one.

Nothing here is guessed from style alone. The maker is named on the object, the model number is on the object, and the rest is construction.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A signed table beats an unsigned one every time, and this one signs itself twice. Most American occasional tables of this generation lost their labels decades ago. This one kept its label and its model number, which means you can say where it was made, by whom, and what they called it.

The oval is the useful part. It fits beside a chair or a sofa without the corners a square table pushes into the room, it works in a hall where a round table would be too deep, and at this height it takes a lamp, a drink and a book without crowding.

The scalloped edge is what makes people touch it. Carved relief catches light from any direction, so the table reads as worked rather than plain even in a dim corner, and the dark glaze in the hollows against the rubbed gold high points does the job that a lamp usually has to do.

For a dealer, a labelled Midwestern table works with surviving trade catalogues is a piece you can catalogue properly and defend on the object. Kenosha is gone, the factory is gone, and the tables are the only part of it still in circulation.