A table is six parts and one joint.

A wedged through-tenon holds the table together without glue or screws. Scroll to see the parts meet.

White oak, drawn at eight times full size. Your piece starts with a drawing.

The trestle, in the order it is built

Six parts, no hardware but four screws through slotted holes, and one joint doing all the work.

The Berkey and Gay furniture works seen from above in 1924 — a dense block of multi-story brick factory buildings and a tall chimney, with the houses of Grand Rapids running away below it — The Berkey & Gay works on Monroe Avenue from the air, 1924. Five years later the company was sold to a Chicago mattress manufacturer; it was bankrupt by 1931. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Railroad reaches the city: 1858
Philadelphia Centennial: 1876
Berkey & Gay sold to Simmons: 1929
The last of it: 1948

What is left of Furniture City

Grand Rapids made furniture for the whole country for about sixty years. The river moved the logs, the railroad moved the goods, and after Berkey & Gay took a room full of carved walnut to the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876 the city's name was worth more than any single company in it. Widdicomb, Sligh, Hekman, Phoenix, Baker — at the peak there were dozens.

Then it went. Berkey & Gay sold out to a Chicago mattress company, went bankrupt in 1931, reopened, converted to war work, and folded for good in 1948. Household furniture followed cheap labor to North Carolina and then overseas. What stayed in west Michigan was office furniture, which is a different trade with a different customer, and it is still here and still large.

So the thing this city was known for is now made the way it was made before 1870: one at a time, by somebody standing at a bench. That is not a romantic claim about craft. It is just what is left, and it turns out to be the right size for a dining table that has to fit an actual room.

A nineteenth-century engraved advertisement for the Berkey and Gay Furniture Company, showing their five-story warerooms with horse-drawn wagons outside — The Berkey & Gay showrooms. This is what Grand Rapids sent to the rest of the country, by the railcar, for about sixty years. CC0, New York Public Library, via Wikimedia Commons.

Three pieces, one joint

A trestle at three sizes. It is the same construction each time, because a joint you have cut four hundred times is a joint you can cut well.

Trestle table from $3,780

Console walnut

Bench ash, soap finish

Black walnut, flatsawn, showing cathedral figure and a run of pale sapwood along one edge

The same table, in six woods

Wood is most of the price and all of the character, and a two-inch swatch will not tell you what a six-foot top looks like. Pick one and the drawing changes.

Specify one properly

The list for the table drawn at the top of this page, at six feet by three foot one, in white oak.

The cut list, since you are paying for it

Numbered because the order is the work: a mortise is cut before the tenon that fits it, and the wedges are fitted last of all. 41 board feet of finished part, 55 bought rough, which is where a third of the timber cost goes and why nobody quotes from finished sizes.

#	Part	Length	Section
1	Top	6′ 0″	37″ × 1.5″
2	Bearer × 2	2′ 4″	3.25″ × 2.25″
3	Post × 2	1′ 11½″	3.5″ × 3″
4	Foot × 2	2′ 6″	3.5″ × 2.75″
5	Stretcher	4′ 2″	1.5″ × 5.5″
6	Wedge × 4	5″	0.75″ × 1.1″

Come and stand next to one

The shop is open two days a week and there is usually something half-built on the bench. Nobody has ever regretted putting a hand on a table before ordering one, and several people have changed wood because of it.

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