Although hundreds of furniture makers worked in English and Dutch speaking colonies of America in the seventeenth century, only a handful can be identified today. In New England, two of the best documented are William Searle and Thomas Dennis, the latter sometimes mistakenly remembered as Dennis Thomas, who trained in Devonshire, England, and settled in Ipswich, Massachusetts, during the 1660s. Once in America, Searle and Dennis continued to produce objects in the same manner they had in England. Their distinctive florid carving was indebted to Renaissance designs, which became a popular source of surface ornamentation for medieval forms such as joined lift-top chests. Note, however, there was no known separate autonomous sect or guild of joined lift-top chest craftsmen who screamed, rante
