The land in America is abundant, no doubt about that.

Early in the 19^th century the United States started to find it’s identity.

Immigrants, stragglers, hustlers, and revelers looking to answer this thing we call Life.

Ready to grab it by the horns, and ride it   to death, laughing in victory.

Jelly Cupboards and Cabinets became a household staple to our early pilgrimage.

The popularity of the item grew from New England, spreading as far West it could.

It wasn’t a hard sales pitch.

By 1830, everyone seemed to be eating jelly.

Grape, Mint, even Jalapeno jelly in the Southwest would find storage in the kitchen.

At Manchester Wood we participate in the tradition of Jelly Cabinets, and are proud to offer these pieces, a part of early American culture.

Click here to see our collection.

“That’s all your house is, it’s a pile of stuff with a cover on it…”

George Carlin jokingly (perhaps not) once conveyed about our lives.

We all, generally speaking, do love stuff, and we do need places for that stuff.

Our Storage Solutions line is our answer to that call.

We’ve focused on space efficiency and functionality along with style in storing items. From the early stages of our company we produced the popular Multipurpose Cart, a Periodical End Table with Magazine Rack, and more recently our deceiving stuff holding piece, the Chairside Storage Table. Perfect for hiding away most possessions in a classy end table fashion.

“The Mill,” which is what most of our employees call our factory, is located near one of the richest slate deposits in the World. Glacial masses imprinted our land with beautifully colored slate thousands of years ago, leaving us to work with it.

We’ve used local slate on many pieces of furniture, and one of those pieces includes the Slate Top Console Table. It’s a magnificent piece of furniture with great storage capacity.

So that’s our take on stuff, although it doesn’t define us, we do like holding onto things we cherish, which reaches far beyond furniture… and stuff.

Check out our Storage Solutions section here.

It’s amazing how many moving parts there are at a factory. The constant motions, change, fixing, rebuilding, but the community of it, remains the same forever.

Sure like every relationship, it has its ups and downs, hard times and good.

It helps when something comes along and humbles you. Waking you up from the everyday repetitive loop you can linger in.

Last week, we had a spontaneous combustion fire here at “the mill,” our factory and home to more than fifty employees.

The event surely humbled and awoke us.

We were very fortunate, walking away with minimal damage.

Life can remind you in harsh and subtle ways that in fact it can end or change at any moment.

On that dreaded Sunday night, anxiously racing over, we found several employees coming in at different times to help.

No time cards clocked, working into the late hours of the night only to be back Monday morning, just a  few short hours later.

This week we wish to thank all of our employees for their dedication to Manchester Wood. Also to all manufacturing companies in America who fight everyday to survive in our country.

To the hardworking and downtrodden, your fellow man thanks you.

Also to our Mother Earth for giving us such amazing resources!

Our Adirondack Chair on Lake George, NY

As the years go by, more discussion for green job growth continues.

Our Government leans towards a more “green tech” and “green economy” for our people, and we’d have to agree.

We started posting some facts on Twitter about the sustainable wood we use from around our region in New England, Pennsylvania, and New York.

I figured we needed more than a 140 characters, which is all Twitter allows at a time to explain our stand behind sustainable, green practices in wood manufacturing.

Manchester Wood uses only natural hardwood. The hardwoods of the oak, ash, and maple tree primarily.

Why do we use hardwood?

It is not only a great natural resource where we live, but it’s biodegradable and renewable; the tree naturally re-seeds, growing by the multitude.

Here are a few facts we pointed out on our Twitter Account:

-US hardwood is in excess of 10,000 million cubic meters, growing at rate of 40 million cubic meters per year after harvest.

-Trees produce oxygen, destroying carbon dioxide and store carbon, thus they reduce greenhouse gases. Once cut and made into a product, the carbon is captured.

-US Hardwood is sustainable, biodegradable, and renewable.

Choosing to purchase from our small hardwood furniture company gives you the assurance that the trees were harvested responsibly.

One of those early American settlers was “Bud” Hillerich. In 1880, at 14, he’d begin to learn his father, Johann Fredrich Hillerich trade by serving as an apprentice in his woodworking shop.
His father went mostly by J.F. Hillerich, and was a German born citizen, looking for a fresh start in America. He was proud of his young boy, and let him work on side projects in his shop.

At 18, Bud went to work on a baseball bat for the company’s first professional ballplayer, Pete Browning, who played for the Louisville Eclipse. Browning nicknamed the bat “The Louisville Slugger.”

The popularity grew, orders started coming in all over the country. Johann changed the woodshops name to “J.F. Hillerich & Son.” “The Louisville Slugger,” baseball’s premier bat, was born.
From Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, to today’s stars, “The Louisville Slugger” remains the prized possession of the best hitters in Baseball.
What does this have to do with Manchester Wood and our furniture? We use the same sturdy, long lasting White Ash in our furniture as they’ve used all these years on their bats.
White ash is considered the “premiere species” of North American ashes, for being hard, strong, exceeding bending qualities, and easily worked in our mill.
“The Louisville Slugger,” web site states, “Pound per pound, ash is the strongest timber available. Ash has a flexibility that isn’t found in other timbers like maple. It tends to flex rather than break, which gives a strong ‘sweet spot’ in terms of breakage. Ash is lighter than maple, giving a wider range of large barrel models.”

Although we don’t use our durable, long-last White Ash for home runs at the ballpark, we do on our indoor items, giving customers products lasting for generations at a fair price.

Many low cost products are made with artificial laminates. The laminates are made with a substrate such as particleboard or a medium density fiberboard (MDF), and then covered with a thin imitation wood grain layer made out of vinyl, foil, or paper. The substrate is made from wood chips, small pieces of cardboard or paper, and then pressed with glues to hold it together. These items are initially okay to “look” at but if you go to move them they usually break apart and wind up in the trash hopper. Once the hardware pulls out of the holes they cannot be reattached because the material is “ripped and torn” apart. They are the “lowest quality”.

The next type of construction is with veneers. Veneers are thin slices of wood that are usually bonded to particleboard or MDF. They give the appearance of a solid piece of wood but because of the thin layer, they often “chip” off to the under layer particleboard or MDF. Hardwood veneers can also be bonded to solid wood or plywood. This construction gives you the “look” but doesn’t hold up as well as true solid wood.

Solid wood is the best quality that you can find for your furniture. The wood is sawed directly from the tree into boards and kilned dried to a proper moisture content. It can then be cut and ripped to specific sizes. It may also be edged-glued together to make wider boards. The glue lines of these panels are actually stronger than the wood grain itself. This is the type of furniture that Manchester Wood has been producing for over thirty years now. Our furniture can last for generations. It can easily be repaired because it is “solid” with no cheaper substrate in the center of the part.
The products you will find on our website are all made from solid white ash or soft maple hardwood that is carefully harvested from surrounding forests in the northeastern part of the United States.

Our solid hardwood products are available at our Manchester, Vermont Store (4357 Main St) and our Granville, New York Factory Outlet (1159 County Route 24). You may also order online from our website: ManchesterWood.com.

To learn more about our American hardwoods, please go to the Hardwood Manufacturers Association website at http://www.hardwoodinfo.com/.

How can you know for sure your wood desk, coffee table, or other wooden furniture is made from legally harvested wood? It’s tough. Wood is such a ubiquitous materials that people often fail to consider where it originates from. Progress is being made, however. Organizations such as the Sustainable Forest Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) have developed labeling systems that make it easier to track chain of custody from the forest to the final product. Currently, this is the only reliable way that consumers have of being sure that their wood furniture comes from legal timber.

At Manchester Wood, we take timber smuggling and environmental sustainability seriously. We can guarantee that all of our wood home and office furniture is constructed out of legal, “green” timber. We ensure these standards by only buying American-grown timber. Stringent regulation in the U.S. means that American timber is harvested in accordance with the law. By eschewing international timber we are able to focus on building quality furniture without having to worry about the legality of our materials. Furthermore, we only buy timber that has been certified as eco friendly by the SFI. As product labeling and chain of custody tracking becomes more widespread, we hope to see timber smuggling and illegal harvesting decrease. Until that day, we work to ensure that all the timber we use is legally harvested from sustainable forests.

Video Narrated by Raffi Khatchadourian

Audo Interview with Raffi Khatchadourian