One of the most engaging of such objects is the chest, about which this book is concerned. An ancient style of furniture, at once for sitting and for storage, the chest became the repository of an individual's goods: his (or her) clothes, linens, treasures. When in the eighteenth-century the Germans came in droves to America--to Pennsylvania--they brought the chest and the nascent individualism it represented with them. The majority of these pieces were either finished or simply painted, but the minority of inlaid or paint-decorated chests are the classic pieces of Pennsylvania-German decorative art to this day. -- Pg. 14.