Hoosier Cabinets and the Dream of Efficiency

Flip through any lifestyle magazine, and you’ll stumble upon an article on kitchen organization. You’ll find tips for decluttering counters and maximizing storage, undergirded by the rationale that organization yields efficiency, a priority for those who don’t want to spend hours making meals.

But there are other advantages to uncluttered kitchens. There’s health, for instance. Studies demonstrate there’s a psychological benefit to tidy domestic spaces as well as a correlation between cleanliness and overall wellbeing. An organized kitchen can yield significant financial rewards as well; new countertops and cabinets can increase a home’s overall value. And, lastly, the kitchen—“the heart of the home”—is where families often gather. It is, for many, the focal point of domestic life.

That’s a notable change from times past, when the kitchen was in fact the least desirable room in a family’s residence.

In the Middle Ages, kitchens were ill-lit. Covered by thatched roofs and generally chimney-less, they were noisy, smelly, messy places, heated with wood-burning stoves which took time to catch and needed to remain lit long enough that food could be cooked, making them hot and comfortable.

Until the late nineteenth century, kitchens featured only a few basic pieces of furniture: “a worktable and sink, a storage cupboard, and a few open shelves; dry goods purchased from the grocer were kept in a pantry, along with rows of the canned goods that most women made from homegrown produce,” writes Nancy Hiller in “The Hoosier Cabinet and the American Housewife.”

For the most part, built-in shelving, cabinetry, and countertops were costly luxuries enjoyed exclusively by the upper-class whose members were the only ones able to afford expert carpenters. At the same time, the industrial revolution was in full swing, prompting advancements in mass production and making goods of all sort more available and affordable. Consumers embraced new ways of thinking about outfitting their homes. Kitchens could now readily grow to include features—cabinets and countertops—we now take for granted.

Among those who met this hunger was the Indiana-based Hoosier Manufacturing Company, which began making its Hoosier cabinet in 1899. This was, Hiller explains,

a freestanding cupboard equipped with ingenious mechanical devices, consolidated storage and maximized the efficiency of kitchen labor, thereby alleviating some of the most exasperating aspects of the middle-class housewife’s daily responsibilities.

Tracing the lineage of the Hoosier Cabinet is complicated, according to William Warner, a retired historian at Coppes Commons, a shopping center and museum complex in Indiana that houses a collection of early Hoosier cabinets.

“As far as we know no one person or company is given credit for the invention of what we now call the Hoosier cabinet,” he says. While it’s possible to find several early United States patents for a kitchen cabinet starting about 1885, many furniture companies jumped on the Hoosier cabinet-making band wagon.

Though most of these concerns hailed from Indiana, as the cabinet name suggests, some were based in Ohio and elsewhere in the Midwest.

“We have found approximately 130 different companies that produced a version of the new popular kitchen cabinet, either from newspaper advertisements, internet sales of cabinets, or seeing a cabinet personally at antique malls,” Warner says. The only one that still makes cabinets is Coppes Napanee, which began its life as a sawmill in 1876 before branching out into retail lumber and then, in 1903, Hoosier cabinets. Twenty-four odd years later it was making 23,000 of them annually. Indeed, some estimates suggest a tenth of all households contained a Hoosier cabinet by the 1920s.

The Hoosier cabinet made the kitchen easier to navigate and more accessible to middle-class housewives in particular who had largely depended on housekeepers to run their kitchens. By the turn of the century, Hiller writes, these domestic workers headed elsewhere to earn their wages, leaving the housewives to tend to kitchen affairs. “As domestic servants exchanged their harried positions for the structure and independence of industrial work, their former mistresses were forced back into their own kitchen,” she writes.

Hoosier cabinets promised housewives “fewer steps” when it came to meal prep—in the literal sense that the middle-class housewife wouldn’t have to walk back and forth or to external pantries around the property to make a meal. Everything was sorted together in one place for ease of use. Later models of the Hoosier cabinet came with meat grinders and flour sifting attachments or bonus pullout work surfaces. Though not very large, standing at approximately 72 inches tall, the Hoosier cabinet filled a storage and organizational void.

In many ways, the Hoosier cabinet had been envisioned decades previously. Some nineteenth-century writers and thinkers were preoccupied with making home design more functional and efficient. In 1869, Catharine Beecher and her sister Harriet—author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and famous abolitionist—considered how practical home design choices could address the challenges facing contemporary women. Foremost among these challenges was a lack of time for pursuits including reading, education, or spending time with children.

“Beecher and Stowe offer advice on everything: building the home itself; providing proper ventilation; choosing from among the different kinds of stoves, furnaces, and chimneys; even properly maintaining earth-closets,” writes Kristin J. Jacobson in “Renovating The American Woman’s Home: American Domesticity in Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.”

Beecher in particular was interested in reforming all matters related to women’s domestic lives. Many of her writings offered house plans and architectural renderings putting into practice her theoretical solutions.

“She made a particular mark in insisting that women treat the care of home and family as a science, a science whose subjects ranged from the efficiency of kitchens to the technology of heating, ventilation, and plumbing, to child rearing, cooking, gardening, and health,” writes Diana Strazdes in “Catharine Beecher and the American Woman’s Puritan Home.”

Beecher wanted the kitchen to be the center of the home—to make it more accessible in terms of foot traffic and to position it as a gathering site for family members. She encouraged people to prioritize their kitchens when it came to spending money on the home.

“Far better, she insisted, ‘to give up some expensive article in the parlor, and apply the money thus saved for kitchen conveniences,’” Strazdes writes, quoting Beecher.

Scholars quite rightly point out that although Beecher cared less about the working and lower classes, she nevertheless forever changed the way we understand the kitchen today.

Above all, Beecher supported the “white middle class, a population whose ‘rightful’ hegemony she sought to bolster through the vehicle of moral improvement,” Strazdes says, adding that “her means of achieving that end was to reinforce the primacy of the family by constructing for it a house that would focus inward.” The focus, in other words, was on the primacy of the family unit and strengthening family bonds over all others.

And yet, Beecher imagined a kitchen with work centers equipped with the latest technologies and innovations. Storage was compartmentalized and close at hand. Bins for flour and other staples were accounted for in the kitchen’s design. With her sister, Beecher “had enumerated exactly those areas of the middle-class housewife’s daily existence that warranted remediation,” Hiller observes.

Occasionally, early advertisements for the Hoosier cabinet hearkened to Beecher, if not explicitly, says Hiller, proving their influence in this domain “unmistakable.”

Adverts for the Hoosier cabinet promised ease of use, a streamlined workflow with greater efficiency, and more free time. The cabinets were so popular that, according to information from Coppes Napanee, they counted more than 300 different models of the Hoosier cabinet in their records in the first part of the twentieth century

By 1940, they had fallen out of favor, as homemakers realized built-ins shelving was easier to keep tidy and furniture makers realized they were more economical to manufacture. Hoosier cabinets were hard to clean underneath; dust and grime flourished in the open space below the cabinet. Hoosier makers tried to compete, adorning their cabinets with pretty patterns and vibrant colors. According to Hiller, some manufacturers tried “adopting designs traditionally associated with more formal types of furniture, offering its basic Hoosier in a vaguely Mediterranean version.” None of the rebranding stratagems took.

Today, the obsession with kitchen efficiency continues to thrive, playing out in trendy air fryers and instant pots. Debates rage over whether kitchens should become smarter, with WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled appliances fridges endowed with the ability to reorder milk and detergent. But such technology may only increase a sense of insularity and isolation within a home, argue Genevieve Bell and Joseph Kaye in their article “Designing Technology for Domestic Spaces.” Beecher’s suggestion that technology might bring family members closer together by cutting the amount of time spent on chores has perhaps reached its ultimate conclusion.

“Technology played on the American ideal of self-reliance,” write Bell and Kaye. ”Such houses promised a kind of island-like existence, where the family was sheltered from the world, and all interactions beyond the home could, and would, be mediated through technology.”

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