Furniture making in East Cambridge, birthplace of the Davenport sofa in America’s Gilded Age
by Michael Kuchta, 2025
For more than a century, from the 1850s until after World War II, East Cambridge was home to a number of nationally prominent makers of custom furniture. The industry grew with the help of skilled and semiskilled laborers, mostly recent immigrants; the invention of steam-powered saws, planers, lathes and other woodworking machines; timber from New England forests; and ready access to port facilities and local markets in Boston. Not much remains of the local furniture industry aside from the sturdy buildings that once housed it, including the brick structure at 25 First St., now known as The Davenport.
As far back as the 1600s, coastal Massachusetts was a center of shipping, shipbuilding and lumber milling and trading, and the Boston region developed supplies of raw materials (wood) and skilled workers capable of making furniture. Wood for furniture came from forests in Massachusetts and Maine and from trade with other regions of the world. During the Colonial era, Boston woodworkers made chairs and tables for the local population and export to other regions of British North America. By the early 1800s, Boston’s cabinetmakers competed with their peers in larger cities such as New York and Philadelphia for a growing national market and began to focus on higher-profit items – custom furniture for churches and government buildings and specialized items such as piano cases. They also began to leave the center of Boston for less expensive land in East Cambridge, where they could build larger factories and capture economies of scale while still being close to the retail trade in the city center. The completion of the Craigie Bridge (where the Museum of Science sits today) in 1809 opened East Cambridge, much of it former marsh, to new development. Raw materials such as lumber entered East Cambridge from the Middlesex Canal and later via railroads.
A man named John A. Ellis, living on Gore Street in East Cambridge, was listed in city directories in the 1850s as a cabinet maker. He advertised his services in 1858 at planing, sawing and turning wood for furniture, and he offered a supply of exotic woods such as mahogany and walnut. A year later, Ellis’ firm produced elegant pieces for the Vermont capitol building in Montpelier, and by 1860, the company employed about a hundred workers, a substantial enterprise for its day. Ellis ran his firm on Gore Street, between Fifth and Sixth streets, until his death in 1869.
An article in the Cambridge Chronicle in May 1868 noted: “Not even those who pass through [East Cambridge] on the horse cars, or visit the courts, have an idea of the bustling industry which prevails such a little way from the main street.” The Chronicle reported that the Ellis furniture factory employed “M. Victor Charmois, formerly of Paris, who has been the designer of this establishment for a number of years, and who has a wonderfully quick pencil, a most correct taste, and great originality. All the time of M. Charmois is occupied in inventing patterns of elaborate book cases, chimney pieces, staircases, draping curtains and the like, and the result of his labor is to be seen in some of the grandest mansions in New England.” The Chronicle reported that Ellis had furnished many fashionable houses in Boston’s Back Bay and South End, and that the firm fitted out “two magnificent steamers of the Bristol Line, a contract which required over six months for its completion.”
Ellis & Co. ended operations in the early 1870s, possibly the result of a financial panic, but furniture making continued at other enterprises in East Cambridge.
Cabinetmaker Ferdinand Geldowsky was born in Berlin in 1830 and emigrated to New York at the age of 17. Moving to Boston in 1857, he set up a furniture shop in the South End. In 1863, he relocated to Otis Street in East Cambridge and became one of the first large-scale furniture manufacturers in the neighborhood. Locally, Geldowsky’s commissions included Cambridge’s City Hall and the Massachusetts State House. The business reached markets well beyond Boston and helped to establish Cambridge’s national reputation as a center of high-quality furniture making in the 1860s. The Geldowsky factory grew to occupy the full block between First, Second, Otis and Thorndike streets. Though handcrafting was still important to the firm’s reputation for quality, it also made use of modern technology. Steam from a nearby boiler plant provided power to a variety of machines, including planers, circular saws, moulding machines, jigsaws, boring machines and lathes. The firm suffered a financial reverse in 1877, and new owners took over from Geldowsky. By 1883, the factory employed 350 workers, and its products were sold across the country and shipped to overseas markets. Encountering more financial difficulties, the business closed in 1888, and Geldowsky himself died two years later. Several other furniture makers occupied the complex of buildings it had erected.
One of these was the firm of A.B. and E.L. Shaw, which specialized in furniture for churches. The company traced its founding to 1780, when a man named Jacob Forster began making furniture in nearby Charlestown. The Shaw firm moved to East Cambridge around 1863 and occupied a portion of the former Geldowsky furniture factory on Otis Street beginning in 1886. The company employed as many as 200 designers, artisans, office staff and laborers. A 1905 article in the Cambridge Chronicle reported that the firm had furnished upscale hotels in New York City, Washington, D.C., San Francisco and Albany. A profile of the company published in 1946 noted that it had furnished “hundreds of the leading hotels, colleges, libraries, public buildings and offices as well as private homes throughout the country.” Shaw Furniture continued in business until at least 1967.
Another entrepreneur who set up shop in East Cambridge was Albert Henry Davenport, the son of a Malden milk dealer. In 1880, Davenport took over the Boston furniture business where he had been employed, and three years later, moved to a four-story brick factory building at 108 Cambridge St. (The building, later occupied by Deran Confectionary, survives today as an office and residential complex). Between 1883 and 1903, Davenport expanded his operations to fill out most of the block between Cambridge and Otis streets from First to Second street.
“The furniture factory of A.H. Davenport & Co. at East Cambridge is a local institution concerning which Cambridge people doubtless know little,” the Cambridge Tribune reported in March 1888. “It employs about two hundred men, principally Swedes, who are among the most skilled laborers to be found in the business, and are paid the highest wages. Business is rushing at the factory at present, and despite the large addition made last year the firm has no more room than is needed. None but the highest class of goods is manufactured and quite naturally none but the wealthiest people are patrons of the firm. Among the regular customers are members of the Vanderbilt family and many Boston, New York and Chicago bankers.”
In many parts of the United States, a “davenport” is a common name for a comfortable sofa. What people may not realize is the word’s connection to Cambridge: A.H. Davenport became a nationally known furniture manufacturer, serving a Gilded Age clientele. Davenport furnished private clubs, banks, libraries and the mansions of industrialists and financiers. In 1881, King Kalakaua of Hawaii ordered 225 pieces of furniture from Davenport for the Iolani Palace being built in Honolulu. The company made custom pieces for the White House during the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt (including furniture for the State Dining Room in 1902) and William Howard Taft.
A.H. Davenport worked closely with prominent American architects, including Brookline’s Henry Hobson Richardson and the New York firm of McKim Mead and White, on some of their most important commissions. Davenport created furniture for Richardson’s libraries in Malden and Burlington, Vermont, and for the state capitol building in Albany, New York.
Albert Davenport died in 1906, and in 1914, the A.H. Davenport Co. merged with another local enterprise, Irving & Casson.
Charles R. Irving and Robert Casson, carpenters, had moved to Cambridge in 1885 and established their furniture-making business in 1894. Like several of the other firms mentioned, Irving and Casson took up residence in the factory complex built originally for Ferdinand Geldowsky. By 1896, Irving and Casson employed between 200 and 300 men, according to published sources, making custom cabinets, mantels and other interior woodwork for high-end clients. By 1930 the combined Irving & Casson and A.H. Davenport company employed 500 workers in East Cambridge. The business began a slow decline during the Great Depression, eventually closing in 1972.
Charles Webb was the last manufacturer of fine furniture to operate from the Davenport Building. Webb began leasing space there in 1964 and acquired the property from the Irving, Casson and Davenport heirs in 1977. He continued operations on First Street through the mid-1980s, later moving to McGrath Highway in Somerville and selling his products at a retail store in Harvard Square.
Like many industrial buildings in Cambridge, the Davenport factory was given new purpose after losing the furniture businesses that occupied it for more than a century. The building was converted to an office complex after 1985 and has hosted prominent technology-based firms, including Interleaf, Zipcar, Sonos and HubSpot in the decades since.
This article originally appeared in Cambridge Day.
