Long before she became first lady, Eleanor Roosevelt was promoting gate-leg tables, hand-finished desks, and other historically inspired furniture made in a small workshop near her Hyde Park home. Now, a new exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is highlighting that lesser-known chapter of Roosevelt’s life.
Opening July 18, 2026, Cottage Industry: The Val-Kill Furniture Shop will feature more than 30 works, including rare furniture, conceptual designs, and workshop templates. The exhibition arrives 100 years after Roosevelt and three politically active friends founded Val-Kill Industries. Their furniture was made to last, but the business also had a larger purpose: creating work that could help rural families remain on their farms.
Four Women Built More Than a Furniture Business
Val-Kill Industries was established in Hyde Park, New York, in 1926 by Roosevelt; artist and political organizer Nancy Cook; educator Marion Dickerman, Cook’s life partner; and social reformer Caroline O’Day, who later represented New York in Congress.
Cook was the driving force behind the furniture shop. According to the National Park Service, she managed the factory while Roosevelt promoted its products and mission. O’Day helped finance the partnership and wrote about the shop, although the National Park Service notes that the full extent of her role is unclear.
The workshop grew from an economic crisis unfolding around Hyde Park. Farmers had expanded production during World War I, only to face falling prices, debt, and foreclosures when European agriculture recovered. Roosevelt believed a small rural industry could provide additional income while teaching useful skills.
The Met Helped Inspire the Designs
The Met’s connection to Val-Kill began a century before the current exhibition. As the workshop was taking shape, Roosevelt approached Charles Cornelius, the museum’s first curator of American furniture, for advice. Cornelius gave the women access to the museum’s collection and introduced them to Morris Schwartz, a prominent Hartford furniture restorer.
Meanwhile, Cook studied historic furniture, experimented with stains and finishing methods, and sketched pieces based on antiques at The Met and other collections. Draftsmen converted her sketches into measured drawings and templates that the cabinetmakers could use.
Val-Kill produced gate-leg and butterfly tables, desks, mirrors, dressing tables, trestle tables, chairs, and other household furnishings. The designs favored relatively simple forms that avoided the costly carving and inlay found on more elaborate furniture.
Franklin D. Roosevelt became the workshop’s first customer, ordering furniture for his cottage in Warm Springs, Georgia. His mother, Sara Roosevelt, and family friend Henry Morgenthau Jr.—later Franklin Roosevelt’s Treasury secretary—also placed early orders. The first Val-Kill exhibition and sale was held at the Roosevelts’ New York City townhouse in 1927. It generated more orders than the workshop could initially handle.
Each Piece Was Fully Hand Crafted
Val-Kill’s furniture was made by immigrant craftspeople including Italian cabinetmaker Frank Landolfa and Norwegian-born wheelwright and cabinetmaker Otto Berge.
Instead of moving from worker to worker along an assembly line, each order was assigned to one cabinetmaker. That person selected the wood and remained responsible for the layouts, cutting, and assembly until the piece reached the finishing room.
The shop used traditional construction techniques, including dovetail and mortise-and-tenon joints, and all finished furniture received the Val-Kill trademark. Cook watched the details closely, and her surviving workshop notes contain blunt instructions about wood selection, working times, and the appearance of individual pieces. One document charted as many as 15 finishing steps.
Repeated sanding, staining, and hand polishing produced a soft luster while allowing the grain to remain visible. Local boys worked in the finishing room under Matthew Famiglietti, who managed that part of the workshop and trained successive groups of young employees.
How the Workshop Became Roosevelt’s Home
Val-Kill Industries reached its high point around 1930, when the furniture shop employed six cabinetmakers. The wider enterprise later added a pewter forge. Unfortunately, furniture orders declined as the Great Depression continued, and the shop closed in 1936. The limited surviving documents indicate that the shop made modest profits in several years but did not recover the founders’ total investment.
After the closure, the factory was converted into the house now known as Val-Kill Cottage. It became Eleanor’s permanent home after Franklin Roosevelt’s death and is preserved as part of the Eleanor Roosevelt National Historic Site. One guest room remains furnished almost entirely with pieces made in the workshop.
The Met exhibition will reunite furniture from the historic site and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum with the collection that helped inspire Cook’s original designs. Desks, tables, and chairs from Roosevelt’s home will appear alongside related Arts and Crafts furniture by Gustav Stickley and the Byrdcliffe Colony, as well as Depression-era prints, paintings, and sculpture.
Cottage Industry: The Val-Kill Furniture Shop runs from July 18, 2026, through May 9, 2027, in Gallery 746 North of the Met’s American Wing. The exhibition is included with museum admission.
