Lewis C. Buckner bedroom suite 
Among the recent acquisitions to the ETHS Museum is a late-nineteenth-century bedroom suite consisting of a dresser with mirror, a bedstead, and a washstand. The elegant furniture was made by Lewis C. Buckner of Sevier County for the Whaley family.
Born a slave in the Rolling Hills community (near Strawberry Plains) of Jefferson County, Buckner was a highly skilled carpenter, house builder, and cabinetmaker. By age 24, he had made the fifth district of Sevierville home. This is where he worked under Christian H. Stump, a Caucasian cabinetmaker from Michigan, who ran a thriving production and retail shop.
Buckner began to work as a cabinetmaker as early as 1870, refined his skills in Stump’s shop during the 1880s, and entered a period of intense production by the 1890s. Although he established a shop on what is now Douglas Dam Road, he preferred to travel the countryside with his foot-powered buck saw and his bag of hand tools. He often lived on site and built customized furniture for a particular room.
Buckner’s furniture, like the houses he built, reflects a vernacular treatment of Victorian design elements. He used energetic stamped patterns, carved moldings, and elaborate finials that punctuate and enliven the flat panels of wood. This aesthetic developed through the accretion and juxtaposition of designs borrowed from period pattern books and remained constant throughout Buckner’s career, though he rarely treated these design elements in the exact same manner.