The airy elegance of the late Victorian wicker dressing stand opposite, made by the Heywood Brothers and Wakefield Company of Gardner, Massachusetts, exemplifies American wicker design at its best—exotic and imaginative while still remaining functional. This mirrored table brings together many of the stylistic techniques that ultimately endeared wicker to the general public: graceful cabriole legs, plied-reed detail weaving, intricate beadwork, and a profusion of the coiled tendril-like embellishments known as curlicues. One of the few forms of furniture developed in this country that did not rely heavily on existing European or Oriental designs, antique handmade wicker has enjoyed a nationwide renaissance over the past twenty years.

The lingering confusion about the origin of factory-made wicker furniture stems from the fact that the principal materials used in its manufacture—reed and cane—come from the rattan palm, which grows wild in the Far East. However, the wicker industry was born on American soil. It was on Boston’s waterfront in 1844 that a young grocer named Cyrus Wakefield observed a huge quantity of rattan being discarded on the docks after having served as dunnage aboard a clipper ship returning from the Orient. Wakefield examined one of the long flexible poles and decided that furniture could be made from this strange material. During the next few years he began constructing crude chairs and tables.

Before long he was importing whole rattan from China and using the glossy outer skin, or cane, to wrap his hardwood frames and to make chair seats. As he built up a business, Wakefield used not only the cane but the reed—the inner pith of rattan, which until that time had always been treated as waste. In the mid-1850s he and his family moved to South Reading, Massachusetts, where he established the Wakefield Rattan Company, the acknowledged granddaddy of the wicker industry (it is some indication of his success that South Reading was later renamed Wakefield in his honor).

By 1879 Wakefield was running advertisements claiming “Two Million Dollars Worth of RATTAN FURNITURE has been sold by the Wakefield Rattan Company and its popularity increases every day.” But success attracts imitators, and soon the company found itself competing with another Massachusetts firm, Heywood Brothers. The increasingly intense rivalry between the two manufacturers served to refine existing styles and create flamboyant new ones. In a turn of events more surprising in that era than in our own, the all-out competition came to an abrupt halt in 1897 when the two titans merged to form the Heywood Brothers and Wakefield Company. Their first joint trade catalogue, issued in 1898, included the now-classic and extremely rare wicker dressing stand.

By then wicker had found favor all across America. The well-publicized studio decor of many artists of the period—including James McNeill Whistler,