This cupboard is of a type associated with the Harvard College Joiner tradition, of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Cambridge was the County seat of Middlesex, and home of Harvard College, hence the association with the shop. From 1638-1730, a succession of three joiners were appointed official "college joyner." These men were John Palfrey, and Zechariah Hicks II. During their tenures, these men trained other joiners thereby creating a school of craftsmen who worked in a similar fashion. although the maker of this chest is unknown, the form and decorative elements relate this cupboard to the cambridge joinery tradition. (See Robert F. Trent, "The Joiners and Joinery of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, 1630-1730" in Quimby, ed., Arts of Anglo-American Community in the Seventeenth Century, (Charlottesville, 1975), p. 123).

Made of riven oak boards, the construction of the cupboard incorporates the use of dovetails, present in New England by the 1630s. (Benno M. Forman, "The Chest of Drawers in America, 1635-1730," Winterthur Portfolio, 20, no. 1, (Spring, 1985), p. 15). The drawer is made with two dovetails found with the drawer bottom set into a groove in the lower dovetail; this method is related to dovetails in Boston drawer construction. The turned split spindles and pillars on the upper case are in a manner reminiscent of the Mason-Messinger shop tradition of Boston. Both of these techniques, similar to, but variants from Boston cases, hint at the possibility of shared turners and the transmission of styles through craftsmen between the two communities. The turned pillars, which have shrunk in an ovoid section, support the entablature fitted with original corbels and dentil molding.

Related examples are in the collections of The Concord Antiquarian Society; Colonial Williamsburg; the Winterthur Museum; and two in private collections, one formerly from the collection of Dwight Blaney.

Wood microanalysis has revealed the use of red oak, red maple, and white pine.