The Landesmuseum has a large number of painted popular (folk art) trunks of the area around Braunschweig; this fine-untouched collection was used for research into the history of construction of trunks. Whenever the construction and outside of this type of furniture underwent a change,caused by fashion or by a change of usage, the constructions always were based on a traditional model. Three basic types of trunks can be distinguished: the frontpost trunk, the sidepost trunk, and the box-framed trunk. How people in those days tried to solve the problems of wood shrinkage by means of different construction and special sorts of wood is investigated.