The hardwood forests of Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio, and the continuous arrival of skilled craftsmen who stopped briefly or stayed and settled combined to create an industry which produced great quantities of furniture uniquely American in material, design, and decoration. The furniture industry in Cincinnati serves as a case study of the West's rapid response to need for self-sufficiency in the transformation of raw materials into manufactured goods. In the eighteenth century the easterners had labored under the inferiority complex resulting from comparisons with European civilization and culture. In the nineteenth century although the westerner scoffed at Europe, his feelings of inferiority fired claims of equality and even superiority to the East. As every traveler's account attests, in spite of exaggeration, tall tales and naive boasting, a new and freer civilization was in fact developing. The westerner's pride in the environment he was creating grew to equal and even surpass his ever present pride in the fertility of the soil, the healthful climate, and the other legacies provided by nature. Public build-ings, schools, mercantile establishments, paved streets, toll roads, canals, and manufactured goods were pictured and praised in print as tangible evidence that a miracle was taking place.
Only in recent years have aspects of that nineteenth century miracle begun to be evaluated. Before 1950, thorough research in western furniture, interior design, art and architecture was scant. Jane Sikes, however, is but one representative of an entire group of scholars who are plumbing local and regional source materials in order to document the full range of the cultural contributions of the nineteenth century West. The research for this volume has been a labor of love for nearly a decade.