In recent years an influx of folk furniture imported from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, northern Russia in particular, has made it easier to compare the pieces made by Russian immigrants after their arrival in North America with examples that demonstrate the original context in which the forms, construction methods, and decorative motifs were born. This comparative approach also addresses the perennial issues of tradition, adaptation, and innovation in the transfer of these elements from the old world to the new. This article is an attempt to systematically examine the furniture made by one group of Russian immigrants, the Doukhobors who settled in the Canadian West, and compare it to Russian pieces. But to understand and interpret the objects the Doukhobors made, and the context in which these people began as a nonconforming religious sect, we must first return to their origins in eighteenth-century Russia and their arrival in Canada at the end of the nineteenth century.

The sight of this little settlement of Moravians is highly curious and interesting. Between 200 and 300 persons of this sect here assembled live in brotherly love and set a laudable example of industry, unfortunately too little observed and followed in this part of the country." So wrote the statesman William Loughton Smith (1758-1812) in his journal in 1791, describing the industriousness of the Moravian settlers in Salem, North Carolina. MESDA, over the years has identified sixty-one North Carolina Moravians who worked as joiners, cabinetmakers, turners, chairmakers, or as apprentices in those trades between 1754 and about 1850. What makes these statistics particularly remarkable is that many examples of the furniture these artisans produced are exhibited in their original context--the extant houses and shops of the Moravians who settled Salem, several of which are now museum buildings in the Historic Town of Salem.