12 Years of Living With ‘Campaign Furniture’

Photo by Al Parrish I grew up with campaign furniture. My grandparents collected it. And my dad was fond of building it. We had stacking campaign chests (and, weirdly, side tables) in our house in Arkansas. I didn’t think anything was odd about it. It was simple and rugged stuff. Nothing fancy. But when I started working at Popular Woodworking Magazine, I found that none of the editors had any interest in the style. After surveying 200,000 readers, they had data on their side. Here’s what readers wanted to read about: Country furniture (whatever that is) Shaker furniture Arts & Crafts furniture Other furniture Readers never even mentioned “campaign furniture” when asked what furniture styles they liked. Instead of kowtowing to the data, I decided that readers needed to be exposed to campaign furniture. And then they would like it. So in 2014, I wrote “Campaign Furniture,” a book I spent almost a decade researching. The book has nine projects that offer a fair look at this important…

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