The Folding Bed in the Parlor: Old Kentucky Home Boardinghouse
Today, Julia Wolfe’s Old Kentucky Home boardinghouse displays a dozen bedrooms containing a variety of beds. Yet another bed is hidden in plain sight in the front parlor. To the casual viewer, it looks like a cabinet or wardrobe. Open the door and you will find a folding bed, often called a “Murphy Bed” after William Murphy became well-known for his invention of an “in a wall” bed around 1908. Our folding bed likely held little sentimental value to the Wolfe family and is not the center of any dramatic tales in Thomas Wolfe’s work, though it does offer us some clues about the history of his childhood home. Exploring the furniture’s function and style also provides a fuller story of how life evolved in the boardinghouse.
A careful examination of the cabinet reveals several clues about its origin. Unlike much of the furniture in the historic house, it has a maker’s mark. A stamped label on the back identifies the manufacturer as the Phoenix Furniture Company in Grand Rapids, Michigan. There are also two other stamps revealing two patent dates; May 26, 1885, and September 7, 1886. While there is no visible metal maker’s plate to narrow down the date of construction (normally found on Phoenix’s furniture), the Phoenix Furniture Company produced folding beds from 1887to 1893 according to the Grand Rapids Historical Commission. Advertisements for the bed can be found in newspapers during these same years.
Stylistic elements of the bed also place it within the 1887–1893 timeframe. Some of the geometric design elements and the rectilinear shape of the cabinet are defining qualities of the Eastlake style, which began to pass out of fashion at the beginning of the 1890s. Others, such as the broken pediment/arch, half columns, and floral design on the front of the cabinet are all elements of the Colonial Revival style, which appeared in the 1870s and reached peak popularity at the turn of the 20th century.
Folding beds were designed for use in cramped urban dwellings but, were also useful inside busy boardinghouses in crowded tourist towns like Asheville. There is no record of when Julia Wolfe came to own the bed or when it was first placed in the boardinghouse parlor. It may have come with the house when she purchased the property in 1906. If she purchased the bed after purchasing the house, it was likely bought used. There are no interior photographs of the house prior to the 1940s and therefore no visual clues to support the bed’s history. The earliest clue is an inventory taken by Julia in October 1919, which lists a “folding bed” in the main parlor. Subsequent inventories in 1949 and 1974 also list it as being in the parlor.
Folding beds were called by several names. Their typical placement in the parlor led to them being called “parlor beds.” Many versions of this type of furniture were developed by individual entrepreneurs and inventors well before Phoenix Furniture Company’s 1886 patent and William Murphy’s 1908 patent. Newspapers reveal ads for “cabinet beds” or “parlor beds” at least as far back as 1867. Sarah E. Goode, a Black furniture maker and saleswoman in Chicago (also one of the first Black American women to receive a patent), patented a “cabinet bed” that folded into a rolltop desk in July 1885.
It is evident that Julia Wolfe kept her ear to the ground for popular house trends like sleeping porches and sun parlors when she added rooms to the boardinghouse in 1916. Folding beds remained popular for many decades, peaking in the 1920s. Having a “parlor bed” visible in the front room viewed by prospective boarders on their arrival may well have been an attempt by Julia Wolfe to show her boardinghouse had the latest amenities and thus, was a comfortable place to stay. While we don’t know whether any boarders used the bed during their stay at the Old Kentucky Home, Julia Wolfe likely used it herself during her later years. As her boardinghouse business declined into the 1930s, it became difficult to pay for the upkeep of the house and to heat it in the winter months. In a 1938 letter to her son, Julia wrote “I feel the cold but dress like an Eskimo, to keep from suffering, but can’t get any work done for I have to stay close to the fire here in the living room, even sleep here.” She likely slept on the folding bed near the fireplace in the parlor and could well have kept up this habit until her death in December 1945.
For more information:
http://www.furniturecityhistory.org/audio/2592/folding-beds.
https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/about/news/women-who-made-legal-history-sarah-e-goode/.
