A few years back I made a virtually identical lantern, except not nearly as nice, also using reclaimed (Hipster for "stuff I pulled out of the trash at work") hickory and pine, glass, and steel, with the exception of the hinges and dowels holding it together. I never posted it here because I never intended it as a replica of an original. I just needed a way of carrying a candle around the house during power outages, and being me I just went old-school without really looking into what might be commercially available....
Two things for anyone thinking about building one of these themselves
1) If you want to carry the lantern around while it is lit, I strongly recommend that you make one with a door and a heat shield, such as this one, rather than the style with a hole in the top and a sliding candle-holder. I bought my sister one of the latter style kits that Track of the Wolf sells, and she says that while it works fine as a stationary light the heat coming up off the candle will burn your knuckles if you grab it by the handle. The heat shield on mine gets surprisingly hot, so I believe her...
2) I made mine with an internal height of 12", for an overall height of around 16" excluding the handle. Originals tend to be in the 9-10" range, I recall. My monster lantern is rather heavy and unwieldy (glass is heavy stuff!), and if I were doing it again I'd stick with the original dimensions.
Molly,
I've seen this style of lantern referred to as a "barn lantern" which makes sense - these are about the simplest types of candle lantern out there and do fit the role of a basic utility light. Nicer types were made of tin, such this one:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WBTZ8Dxmfwg/VRMOtevijoI/AAAAAAAARhs/-aV8bkgUORc/s1600/Blog%2B2015%2B-%2B03-27%2B006.JPG. That is one of the "two by land" lanterns hung up in the Old North Church as part of Revere's ride, BTW.
It seems that they were frequently made to be able to be taken apart for transport but I also see it as a consequence of "fasteners" that may have not been available where they were made.
Anybody with the tools and skills to make the top and side pieces could make pegs to hold it together, or even design it so as to use dovetails. The originals of this design usually do use wooden pegs, I think. Glass and the candleholder, hinges, handle, etc., would be harder to get than any fastener, so I think it is just that this design is the simplest and easiest to construct, and therefore the cheapest available...
There are some wooden lanterns that use a different style of construction, something like a wooden version of the tin one linked above. I suspect that if someone really wanted to dig down into the subject, comparisons between the various surviving wooden lanterns and tin lanterns, the construction methods used in other wooden objects of known dates, architectural features, etc., would help establish a firmer timeline for these lanterns. I vaguely remember seeing an example of the box-type wooden lantern with a domed roof and horn panes instead of glass that was said to be a late-18th century lighthouse-keeper's lantern, and there is box type with a box-type lantern without a door shown in Kettell's
Pine Furniture of Early New England that displays architectural details that might indicate a 17th century date, so my own guess is that the box types are earlier and the through-tennon type such as the one shown date sometime in the 19th century, but it is just a guess.
