Scalloped-top furniture flourished along the Connecticut River valley in the second half of the 18th century. The form is believed first to have developed in Wethersfield, Connecticut, and subsequently to have been made in the Northampton and Deerfield areas as cabinetmakers trained in the Wethersfield tradition migrated North. A group of dressing-tables with histories of ownership in Northampton and Hatfield have tops with elaborately molded edges and strongly lobed outset corners very like the top of the tea-table offered above. For more information see The Great River: Art and Society of the Connecticut Valley, 1635-1820 (Hartford, Connecticut, 1985), pp. 222-223 and Michael K. Brown, "Scalloped-top furniture of the Connecticut River Valley," Antiques (May, 1980), 117: 1092-1099.