Julius Barnard apprenticed with Eliphalet Chapin and worked for a period in Northampton, Massachusetts, during the 1790s. By 1801 Barnard established a cabinetmaking shop in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he likely constructed this sideboard for Mills Olcott, a treasurer of Dartmouth College from 1816 to 1822. According to the Olcott papers in Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections library, Olcott and Barnard frequently exchanged goods and services in 1801. By 1802 Barnard had relocated to Windsor, Vermont, and left for Montreal in 1809. The innovative arrangement of inlays on this piece—such as the bellflower blossoms that turn up, rather than down—places it within the rural cabinetmaking tradition of the Connecticut River Valley, although its elegant outlines suggest that the maker was attuned to the high-style furniture emanating from larger urban centers. This is the earliest piece of furniture made in Hanover, New Hampshire, the location of Dartmouth College, in the Hood Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Founded in 1769, Dartmouth College was—and still is—in a remote location in Northern New England. It is located on the Connecticut River on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Abenaki people. Acquiring the mahogany to construct this piece took immense time and effort. That this piece was made so far from an urban center with wood logged by enslaved people in the Caribbean attests to the owner’s wealth and the cabinetmaker’s skill. It likewise helps us understand the deep artistic, commercial, and cultural connections across vast swaths of land and sea in the Early Republic.