This thread is pretty old but I hope that some of the participants are still active in this lovely, new-to-me forum. Many years ago, I inherited a black walnut cylinder-pedestal rolltop desk, which I want to believe was made by the Canadian W. Stahlschmidt & Company. However, the faithfulness by which that Preston, Ontario firm copied the Wooten model, made in Indianapolis about ten years earlier, leaves me unsure. I've read the exhaustive Wooten history published by the Smithsonian Institute in the late 1960s but I have never seen another example of either maker's work in person. I did learn recently that there's an unattributed example just a weekend journey from my home. I will make the trip soon.
My desk was brought to western Canada by my grandfather, who moved from southern Ontario in 1928. The structure was partially repaired at some point, probably due to reclimatisation in the dry prairie air. The base of the desktop insert was replaced with plywood and a black leatherette cover was installed. An embossed, Greek Key border partially remains of the original insert. The rest of the desk appears to be original and has survived in fine, well-used condition.
The built-in accessories and some decorative details of my desk differ from the photos of several others that I've found on the Internet. Principally, the base panels of mine are plain molded, with the centres set with gorgeous thick veneers of burled walnut. They don't have the partly-routered frame edges and carved top half-medallions that appear on all other examples I've seen, including the one presented here by Alley Antiques in February of last year.
The document cases in the cylinder wings are also different from those on Alley Antiques' piece. The left side has 4" square, open-ended, slide-in boxes, presumably sized for rolled sets of contracts. Up the centre are shallow flat drawers that are a bit too narrow for modern letter-size paper. The right wing has horizontal and vertical filing slots, similar to the far left side of the Alley Antiques desk. All of these delicate box-works are made of very thin solid lacewood (no warpage at all!) and have simple brass ring pulls.
The rolltop gallery above the work surface has three pigeonholes on each side, plus two small drawers and two clever little pencil trays, disguised as corbels. A flat apron spans between the banks of pigeonholes and displays the only fancy cuts on the whole desk, including a bit of vine-like gouge carving.
The brass pulls on the front of my desk are more Classical, with a beaded edge on the handle, than what I've generally seen on this type of desk. However, the escutcheon on the rolltop lock is full-blown Aesthetic nonsense. A Corbin Cabinet Lock Co. retractable strike is set flush into the frame of the work surface. It has a partially obscured patent date, which seems to read Dec 16 '78.
Without a maker's label and no trace that one was every fixed to my desk, I really don't know if I have a William Stahlschmidt piece or a probably more valuable American Wooten. My grandfather was fiercely nationalistic and proud of his and his wife's United Empire Loyalist heritages. They were active antiques collectors and, as far as I can tell, all of their finds where of high quality Upper Canada origin, some of it late 18th Century. Although his desk was only about fifty years old when he hauled it out west, he would have been mortified had he known that it might be American. ~Rob in Edmonton, Alberta
For a resolutely Canadian example, please see:
http://www.parl.gc.ca/Sites/collections/decorative_arts/furniture/desks/desks_thumbs-e.htmSorry, until I figure out how to post pictures to this forum, my word pictures will have to suffice as descriptions of my own desk. I'll keep trying.
