"If you can’t tell the difference between skunk and mink, why buy mink?” My father, Israel Sack, loved to repeat this maxim to his customers as a reminder that buying authentic early American furniture requires knowledge and appreciation. Since 1905, when he founded the firm Israel Sack, my father was a man dedicated to mink. From the start, he insisted on dealing in only the best, and, as time passed, he became so highly regarded as an early American furniture authority that his judgment was considered final. Such expertise created quite a responsibility for him. In a business filled with varying degrees of authenticity and fraud, it has become the Sack family’s duty to share our accumulated knowledge for the protection of all.

My father’s passion for authenticity was kindled by an insider’s knowledge of the faking industry. When he first arrived in Boston in 1903, an immigrant cabinetmaker from Lithuania, he promptly put his skills to work in a shop that specialized in imitating early American furniture. He used to say that his boss had an allergy for anything genuine, since everything the firm made was created right there, and then “aged” in a room filled with ammonia or buried in backyard lime pits. (New boys were always initiated by being sent to the ammonia room, where the fumes would knock them flat on their backs.) Once aged, these pieces were given the finishing touch by being battered with a set of keys. The resulting dents and scratches were attempts to simulate two missing centuries of wear and tear.

Eventually, my father became his boss’s greatest concocter. He used to regale us with the stories of his brilliant creations: armchairs, breakfronts and sideboards that looked like showpieces to the inexperienced buyer. One of his favorites was a writing table made out of a base of old boards. “We spent three weeks building a case around them and adding ornamental inlay from top to bottom,” he told us. “By the time we were finished, it was stunning; and, if you checked, those old wooden boards on the inside were false testimony that the piece was authentic. As we expected, a dealer from Boston came in and paid $500 for it—a very stiff price in those days—and he wound up selling it for a big profit. Why not? He sold it as an old one because it had been sold to him as an old one.”

After several years of working in this shop, my father had saved enough money to go into business for himself, this time repairing genuine antiques brought to him by old New England families. Early on, he was captivated by the simple elegance, durability, and personality of early American furniture construction and began buying and selling it on the side. From there, it was an easy, logical transition from cabinetmaker-repairer to dealer. What he responded to most was the individual creativity that the colonial craftsmen demonstrated in their works. Once freed from the restrictions of the English guild system, the American craftsman’s only requirement was that he create durable, utilitarian pieces. And, unlike the English who relied on ornamental carving, the Americans had to create beauty by achieving architecturally exciting forms.

Today the premium prices are being paid for furniture that was made in the most prosperous cities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Great examples from the seventeenth century do show up, but they’re rare. Through shipping and trading, the seaport centers were the first to achieve success, and the resulting merchant class provided patrons for the best-known craftsmen in each area. Since the merchant’s only wealth was his land, home, silver and furniture, he spent a lot of time making sure his treasures were well made. In fact, in Newport, Rhode Island, when a son was born, it was a tradition to buy some of the best mahogany logs available. These would be set aside like money in the bank until the son’s marriage when the wood would be turned into a fine highboy or a kneehole desk.

As each state differed in economic success, so too did the furniture that was produced. For example, prior to the Revolution, when Chippendale furniture was all the rage, New York and Baltimore were not prosperous towns, and most of the Chippendale produced there is only of secondary quality. Newport and Philadelphia, on the other hand, were thriving cities that attracted the best craftsmen of the period. The situation reversed itself in the early nineteenth century, when the federal style was fashionable, and New York and Maryland took the lead.

The most desirable pieces are those that excel in form, proportion, materials, and workmanship and are not only authentic but also in excellent condition. The sum total of these factors signals authenticity, and, like my father, I always feel that I can hear exceptional pieces speaking to me. For those who aren’t fluent in the language of furniture, there are a number of signs and signals that help determine where and when a piece was made. Knowing where to look is, at least, half the battle, and the best way to ensure that you are buying a piece of genuine worth is to familiarize yourself with the various pitfalls you may encounter.

The Five Degrees of Authenticity

The degrees of havoc inflicted on early American furniture vary, like crimes, from traffic tickets all the way to premeditated murder. At the top of this descending ladder is the perfect piece, complete with its original brasses, finish, and structure. The second category includes minor restoration: the sort of things that you would expect after 200-plus years of use, such as one or two brasses missing, or a few repairs to the feet, which may have cracked and needed regluing. These generally do not greatly affect value.

The next two groups involve major restorations, ranging from honest repairs to deliberate alterations made to enhance value. Restoration that is in keeping with the original design would include replacing missing feet or finials or even rebuilding the bonnet top of a chest-on-chest with new parts modeled after existing parts. In these cases, value is decreased, but a piece of restored furniture may still be considered desirable if it represents a form that rarely surfaces in untouched condition.

A dangerous situation arises when furniture is converted from its original design into a more desirable one. This is the kind of tampering that tricks many people into thinking they’ve discovered a bargain when, in fact, their piece has little or no value as an antique. Within this group are things like armchairs that have been converted from side chairs, tea tables assembled from tea trays, and block-front bureaus converted from straight-front bureaus. Since carving and inlay increase the value of a piece, they also appear, in many instances, as later, money-making additions. Another common ploy is to “marry” two different parts to make a more valuable form. There are many tall chests of drawers put together from bases and tops that weren’t originally made for each other. In these cases, since all the parts display plausible signs of age, the indications of fakery are in the different wood grain, decorative details and construction techniques.

The fifth, most fraudulent group is fakes built from the ground up. These are completely without value and are also the easiest to detect since there are very few craftsmen competent enough to fake really well. In addition to skill, faking requires knowledge of regional forms and the types of woods used as well as a supply of genuine pieces to use for parts. Fortunately, this country does not have the necessary combination of ingredients for a wholesale faking industry, and there was actually more faking going on 50 years ago than there is today.

Another category to be aware of is the reproduction. Copying early American styles has been a legitimate, ongoing business since the Philadelphia Centennial of 1876, when a large number of eighteenth-century Chippendale designs were recreated. Usually these pieces are easy to detect by the clumsiness of their proportions as well as by the presence of modern construction techniques and poorly executed details.

How to Tell If a Piece Is Genuine

The detection of restored, faked and reproduced parts begins with a thorough examination of the entire piece. The overall look, which I call “aspect,” should ring true for the period and for the area in which it was made. Regional stylistic differences relate to the ethnic groups that founded each colony. For example, the German settlers of Pennsylvania were fond of durability and strength, while the New England colonies, mostly populated by those of English ancestry, leaned towards puritanical simplicity and lack of ornament. As a result, the same forms were interpreted in slightly different ways, just as English is spoken with different accents; therefore, a knowledge of regional idioms can help determine whether a piece is original through and through.

The type of wood that was used is also a good age indicator. In the eighteenth century, each style and region had its common wood. Most pieces were made of a primary wood for the parts that are visible and a secondary, more inexpensive wood for the frame. For instance, during the Queen Anne period in New England, walnut was most often the primary wood, while in Connecticut it was cherry, and birch was the favorite in New Hampshire. Oak was the principal secondary wood in England but rarely used in this country, where local softwoods such as white pine and chestnut were more plentiful.

The presence of several different kinds of secondary woods often means that a piece has been repaired, added on to or married. In these cases, the new parts are usually stained in an attempt to imitate the rich brown color that occurs when untreated wood is left to oxidize. False oxidation lacks the depth of color of the real thing and often displays a grayish cast that offsets it from the original structure. This is particularly noticeable when a piece has been converted because the old wood has to be cut in some places, and even the slightest surface nick removes the natural patina.

Construction details are another area to be examined. Most pre-nineteenth-century pieces were put together by hand-cut, mortise-and-tenon joints that connect like pieces in a three-dimensional puzzle. Tenons were precisely fit into the mortise and then reinforced with a wooden peg. Over the years, wood shrinks, causing these original pegs to pop out, a feature that’s rarely faked convincingly. After 1800, wooden pegs were replaced with animal or vegetable glue that is less visible than the synthetic glues used in the twentieth century. Early dovetails, the joints used on sides of drawers, are also good indications of age. In the eighteenth century, dovetails were handmade and tended to be larger and less evenly spaced than machine-made nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions. Since each piece was usually crafted by the same person, when all the drawers are pulled out, the dovetails should line up evenly and have a similar style and shape. Differing dovetails may mean that the parts were married.

Tool marks are also excellent age detectors. Since eighteenth-century craftsmen sawed and planed their wood by hand, their work tends to look thick and slightly uneven compared to wood that’s been worked on with machine tools. This unevenness is especially apparent on hidden surfaces such as the bottoms of drawers and the undersides of tabletops. Similarly, eighteenth-century decorative carvings, such as Newport shells, are richer in handmade details and patina than later imitations that often look stiff, swollen and dull. Also take careful note of wear marks, since many times fakers leave dents and scratches in the wrong places. Mathematically, the odds are very slim that with ordinary use the inside of a foot will show a lot of wear—after all, it’s almost physically impossible.

Lastly, price is a strong indication that a piece is genuine because fakes and spurious designs are often offered at 40 to 50 percent of what they should bring. Take, for example, the famous “Brewster” chair, discovered on a back porch in Maine. This chair, a tour-de-force of spindles, was hailed by some as a rare three-centuries-old masterpiece of the Pilgrim period, while others doubted its authenticity. For many months, it was passed from hand to hand until the final owner, a dealer from Exeter, New Hampshire, sold it to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, for $9,000, a tellingly low price for such a rare piece. Once it was in the museum, a clever Rhode Island craftsman named Armand La Montagne stepped forward and admitted that he had made the chair, and, as evidence, his mark was on one of the spindles. Spending two months and $2 worth of materials, La Montagne had created a superb fake, but none of the $9,000 ever went into his own pocket. In published reports of his coup, he is quoted as saying, “I carried off the entire affair merely to prove how fallible museum people can be.”

In my lifetime, I’ve come across fakes and pieces of dubious value far more often than I have seen the real McCoy. But it’s one thing to develop sufficient expertise to be able to spot a fake and another to commit yourself by passing judgment. It’s a situation I’m constantly confronted with, and, much as I dislike to do so, I usually speak my mind. If I didn’t, I’d feel like an accessory to a crime. But even I am sometimes fooled. I may buy something for our shop and later realize there’s something wrong with it. What do I do with these fakes? I take them home and live with them.