Furniture making in East Cambridge, birthplace of the Davenport sofa in America’s Gilded Age

History Cambridge is spending 2025 focused on the history of East Cambridge, including the people who have inhabited the neighborhood, the occupations that employed them and the buildings, streets and public places they created. This is the story of an industry that was once prominent in East Cambridge: furniture manufacturing.

Library of Congress East Cambridge’s A.H. Davenport & Co. made furniture for the White House’s State Dining Room in 1902.

For more than a century, from the 1850s until after World War II, East Cambridge was home to a number of nationally prominent makers of custom furniture. The industry grew with the help of skilled and semiskilled laborers, mostly recent immigrants; the invention of steam-powered saws, planers, lathes and other woodworking machines; timber from