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This chest was made by Duncan Phyfe (1770-1854), one of New York's most renowned cabinetmakers, to house his own cabinetmaking tools. The tool chest contains approximately 300 woodworking tools used for carving, veneering, and inlaying furniture, including more than sixty planes and a variety of files, chisels, gouges, templates, and squares. The chest's current configuration, including the many rehandled tools, may have been undertaken by Phyfe after his retirement in 1847. The chest descended in Phyfe's family to his great-grandsons, Henry Pinkney Phyfe and Churchill Bell Phyfe, who deposited it with the New-York Historical Society in 1927.