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Provenance:

Private Collection, Ontario

Note:

Little information can presently be substantiated about this interesting and important class of bandbox, of which a small number of examples are known. Associated with the area in and around Lunenburg County and Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, boxes of this type feature elaborately chip-carved lids, and are commonly sewn together at the intersection of their bands using brass wire, in place of organic binding material more common on other North American boxes of the period. The most elaborate examples feature compass laid out designs dominated by a central motif of four interconnected lobes laid out over an incised rectangle.

The boxes, while reminiscent of birch bark boxes historically made and used by many Algonquin peoples of the region, are more closely related to German “bandboxes” or “bride’s boxes” likely introduced by German settlers in Lunenburg County. The designs found on the Lunenburg County boxes however do not appear on old word German variants, and are only slightly more closely related to a chip carved and (apparently) wire sewn bandbox in the collection of the Museum of The American Indian, attributed to the Penobscot.[1]

Oral accounts by antique dealers most often attribute the Lunenburg County area boxes to Mi’kmaq makers. One such box is published in Michael S. Bird’s A Splendid Harvest : Germanic Folk and Decorative Arts in Canada, where it is identified as Mi’kmaq.[2] It is notable that the only documented oral testimony attributing a wire-sewn Lunenburg County area bandbox, identifies its maker as an “Indian” of Mahone Bay.[3] Both Lunenburg County and Mahone Bay had been home to Mi’kmaq settlements in the early to mid-19th century, the timeframe when the boxes are thought to have originated.[4]

[1] National Museum of the American Indian, Cat. No. NMAI_14721. https://americanindian.si.edu/collections-search/object/NMAI_14721
[2] Michael S. Bird, A Splendid Harvest: Germanic Folk and Decorative Arts in Canada (Toronto; New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981), 45, pl. 30.
[3] Chris Huntington and Charlotte Mcgill, “A tale of Mystery and Resolution: Boxes of Nova Scotia History, Material Culture, and Aesthetics (and Dried Beans)”, Canadian Antiques and Vintage, Vol. 36 No. 2 March-April 2016, 30-32.
[4] Leslie Francis Stokes Upton, Micmacs and colonists: Indian-White relations in the Maritimes, 1713-1867 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1979), 8, 48.