The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century WilliamsburgThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century WilliamsburgAuthor: Johannes HeuvelContributor: Mills BrownEditor: Thomas K. FordRelease date: May 25, 2018 [eBook #57211]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CABINETMAKER IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WILLIAMSBURG ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century WilliamsburgAuthor: Johannes HeuvelContributor: Mills BrownEditor: Thomas K. FordRelease date: May 25, 2018 [eBook #57211]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg

Author: Johannes HeuvelContributor: Mills BrownEditor: Thomas K. Ford

Author: Johannes Heuvel

Contributor: Mills Brown

Editor: Thomas K. Ford

Release date: May 25, 2018 [eBook #57211]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CABINETMAKER IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WILLIAMSBURG ***

THECABINETMAKERin Eighteenth-CenturyWilliamsburgGiving Attention to the City’s chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way; and to their Tools & Methods of Working.As interpreted byJOHANNES HEUVELMaster Cabinetmaker ofColonial WilliamsburgWilliamsburg Craft SeriesWILLIAMSBURGPublished byColonial WilliamsburgMCMLXIX

Giving Attention to the City’s chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way; and to their Tools & Methods of Working.

As interpreted byJOHANNES HEUVELMaster Cabinetmaker ofColonial Williamsburg

Williamsburg Craft Series

WILLIAMSBURGPublished byColonial WilliamsburgMCMLXIX

Illustrated capital T

The most historic piece of furniture in historic Williamsburg today is the throne-like Speaker’s Chair that stands in the far end of the House of Burgesses.

It is the very same chair that stood there when the portly Peyton Randolph was speaker of the House, and men like George Mason and Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry raised aloft in that chamber the banner of human liberty.

The same chair was probably there in 1759, too, when a newly elected burgess stood in his place to receive the plaudits of the House for his bravery in the French and Indian War. From it Speaker John Robinson came to the embarrassed young man’s rescue with the words: “Sit down, Mr. Washington; your modesty is equal to your valour, and that surpasses the power of any language I possess.”

Perhaps the Speaker’s Chair was among the “several other things” that were saved—along with the colony’s records and the portraits of the royal family—when flames gutted the Capitol in 1747. If so, this chairmaybe thevery one installed when the Capitol building was first completed in 1705. The Assembly had specified that the burgesses’ chamber should “be furnished with a large Armed Chair for the Speaker to sit in, and a cushion stuft with hair Suitable to it.”

Because of these historic associations the Speaker’s Chair may seem a most fitting key to open this account of furniture making in colonial Williamsburg. Its true aptness to the topic, however, lies in other circumstances: No one knows who made the chair or where it was made or even when it was made. And this kind of uncertainty pervades the entire subject of cabinetmaking in eighteenth-century Virginia.

A sketch of the Speaker’s Chair, reproduced full size from the 1777 journal of Ebenezer Hazard, a New England bookseller, historian, and surveyor general of the Post Office.

To continue for a moment with the same example, the Speaker’s Chair has the kind of scrolled arms frequently found on William and Mary furniture—a style that in 1700 was passing out of fashion in England. Its simple cabriole legs, with smooth knees and round feet, are typical of the early Queen Anne style just then coming into English fashion. The chair bears an overall resemblance, furthermore, to the one that stood in the House of Commons, as shown in contemporary prints. Finally, a great many items for the construction and furnishing of the Williamsburg Capitol were ordered from London.

All these circumstances give strong reason to think that the chair came from England. But they do not prove that it did. In fact, the stylistic concepts and the workmanship are such as might well have come from the shop of a Williamsburg cabinetmaker endeavoring, after the fire of 1747, to reproduce the original chair from memory.

The fact that it is constructed in part of American black walnut might seem to prove that the chair was made,if not in Williamsburg, at least in the American colonies. Unfortunately, it proves nothing of the kind. Because, among other reasons, they had found the American variety less susceptible to “the worm” than English walnut, English cabinetmakers preferred the American wood and used it extensively.

“Wheresoever we landed upon this [the James] River, wee saw the goodliest Woods as Beech, Oke, Cedar, Cypresse, Wal-nuts, Sassafras, ... and other Trees unknowne,” wrote George Percy, one of the original Jamestown colonists in 1607. Captain John Smith, who explored and mapped both Virginia and New England, recorded that “all the Countrey is overgrowne with trees.”

Indian clearings, even those made in the course of fire-hunting, were infinitesimal in the vast extent of the woods. The white man’s efforts made a bigger dent, but after a century of English settlement the Reverend Hugh Jones could still report that Virginia was “one continuous forest.” And the same was true of the whole Atlantic coastal area—to say nothing of the wilderness beyond the mountains.

The size of the individual trees in this primeval forest rarely failed to excite comment, beginning with George Percy’s mention of the “goodly tall Trees” he saw near Cape Henry, the Jamestown settlers’ first landing site. With an unlimited supply of very wide boards to be had for the sawing, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial cabinetmakers found good use for them in table tops and leaves, and the sides and tops of chests. Boards were often 18 to 20 inches wide, and sometimes they measured as much as two feet in width. In colonial days even wild cherry sometimes stood 100 feet tall and four feet thick.

Up and down the coast of America grew an enormous variety of trees, both evergreen and deciduous. All of them found some use in the colonial home, from rough-hewn structural members to finely crafted furniture—and evento common hairbrushes and combs. In 1774 William Aylett of King William County, 50 miles from Williamsburg, advertised:

PLANK and SCANTLING to be sold by the Subscriber at his Saw Mill nearAylett’s Warehouse,MattaponyRiver, upon the most reasonable Terms, and of the following Kinds,viz.White Oak, Black Walnut, Sweet Gum, Ash, Poplar, Birch (which makes elegant Furniture) best Yellow Heart Pine for Flooring, and clear of Heart and Sap if required, common high Land and Slash Pine for other Uses....

Almost anything could be made of wood, and almost everything was, including many of the articles we today are familiar with in steel, iron, copper, aluminum, alloys, plastics, and rubber. Pitchforks, tableware and kitchen utensils, wheels, axles, gears and bearings, tool handles and sometimes the bodies of tools, all were made, at least in part, of wood.

The variety of woodworking crafts was almost as great as the variety of trees. In Williamsburg alone—and Williamsburg was by no means an important center in this respect—mention has been found of all the following during colonial times:

In addition, there were such related crafts as upholsterer, lumber merchant, gilder, japanner, and coach painter.

Eighteenth-century Williamsburg was not, however, quite so crowded with woodworking craftsmen as this list wouldindicate. For if the guild traditions of the Old World required that each operation be the monopoly of a specific craft, in the New World practical needs tended to force a merging of related crafts. Only in a few of the big colonial cities—Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or Charleston—was demand great enough to keep some of the specialists going. Elsewhere the craftsmen of town or village had to be versatile—or go hungry. A Williamsburg cabinetmaker, thus, was likely to be also joiner, carver, and upholsterer—and probably undertaker as well.

This illustration from Diderot’s famous eighteenth-century encyclopedia of the arts and sciences shows the interior and lumber yard of a large European joinery. Workers inside the shop are making, carving, and fitting various elements of paneling. Outside, to the right, two others are ripping a length of scantling with a pit saw.

Right here it may be well to explain the difference between joinery and cabinetmaking as crafts, always remembering that in Williamsburg and in most of colonial America both might be practiced by the same craftsmen. Joinery involvedthe making and installing of paneling, molding, mantel-pieces, staircases, and similar interior trim in houses. A joiner might also make furniture of the plainer sort. Cabinetmaking demanded skills of a higher order to create furniture having such refinements as curved surfaces, dovetail joints, cabriole legs, carved ornamentation, veneered or inlaid surfaces, and upholstering.

Joiner and cabinetmaker were both concerned basically with fitting together pieces of wood to make a whole structure. The pieces or parts had to be shaped, of course; and it was in the shaping processes—sawing, planing, and chiseling—that the worker’s real skill showed up. Pieces properly formed will fit together neatly and enduringly, while no amount of glue will make a sound joint of pieces that do not fit.

Two crafts always prominent in Europe are noticeably absent from the list of Williamsburg woodworking crafts. Marquetry, the intricate inlaying of patterns in contrasting woods, seems not to have been much practiced anywhere on this side of the Atlantic; probably Williamsburg cabinetmakers were rarely, if ever, called on for inlay work. The absence of turnery from the list, however, does not mean it was unknown here but only that Williamsburg cabinetmakers customarily did their own lathe work instead of sending it out to a specialist.

Here, too, may be the best place to make first acquaintance of the four Williamsburg practitioners about whom most information survives. They—and the periods of their known activity as cabinetmakers in Williamsburg—are:Peter Scott, 1732-75, who lived across the street from Bruton Parish Church and had his shop somewhere nearby, and who was, for forty years, a member of Williamsburg’s common council;Anthony Hay, 1751-67, whose “large Cabinet Maker’s Shop” has been re-created on its original Nicholson Street site, who turned innkeeper as host of the Raleigh Tavern, and whose son George, as United States attorney, prosecuted Aaron Burr for treason;Edmund Dickinson, 1764-78, who probably worked in Hay’s shop and eventually occupied it as his own master; andBenjamin Bucktrout, 1766-78, whose funeral side line became the chief business of his posterity in Williamsburg for several generations.

When Anthony Hay died in 1770, his executors advertised for sale his two lots on Nicholson Street including a dwelling house, shop, and “Timber Yard.” The reader should not assume from the words “timber yard” that Hay (and his successors at the same location on Nicholson Street, Bucktrout and Dickinson) supplied lumber to the town’s other users. Probably it was stocked only for the proprietor’s own use. In any event, the kinds of raw material that would have been piled in Hay’s yard can be guessed fairly easily.

As we shall presently see, no surviving piece of eighteenth-century furniture can be positively traced to Hay or any other Williamsburg maker. But every piece having a possible claim to local origin, including the Speaker’s Chair, contains either walnut or mahogany as the primary wood. Similarly, few documentary records survive to tell about the furniture actually made in Williamsburg shops and they do not always mention the kinds of wood used. Where they do, however, walnut and mahogany are invariably specified. Finally, archaeological excavation at the site of the Hay cabinet shop turned up a roughed-out table leg dating probably from Dickinson’s occupancy. Quite well preserved in the damp silt of the stream bed, it was easily identified as walnut. All things considered, therefore, Hay’s timber yard would surely have contained ample supplies of both walnut and mahogany.

American black walnut, known in England as “Virginia walnut,” had been the most important of native woods to the colonial cabinetmaker since the seventeenth century. Strong, durable, hard enough to resist surface marring indaily use but still easy to work and carve, it shows a handsome grain, has a lovely color, and takes an excellent finish.

Known and infrequently used earlier, mahogany began to arrive in quantity both in the colonies and the mother country about 1725. In England, by the middle of the century, it had pushed aside walnut as a furniture wood. Mahogany never rose to the same pre-eminence in the colonies because other fine woods were so readily available. Mahogany was imported from Jamaica and Honduras legally, from Santo Domingo and Cuba illicitly via Jamaica. The wood from each source differed variously in its characteristic graining, color, strength, hardness, and workability. That from Santo Domingo, known as “Spanish mahogany,” was considered most desirable.

The wood of the wild black cherry was a favorite among Connecticut cabinetmakers, as it was farther south too, because of its natural strength, close grain, warm color, and resistance to splitting and warping. Peter Kalm, the Swedish botanist who visited Philadelphia in 1748, wrote:

The Joiners say that among the trees of this country they chiefly use the wild cherry trees, and the curled maple.... The wood of the wild cherry-trees (Prunus Virginiana) is very good, and looks exceedingly well, it has a yellow color, and the older the furniture is, of which is made of it, the better it looks. But it is already difficult to get at it, for they cut it everywhere, and plant it nowhere.

Hay’s yard might well have had some cherry in its piles of lumber, though probably not in great quantity. It might also have included a bit of maple—a primary favorite in New England—perhaps in some choice pieces showing the bird’s eye, curly, wavy, blister, or quilted grain patterns that often occur in this wood.

In addition, cedar, hickory, ash, beech, birch, oak, elm, locust, apple, holly, and other hard woods might have been present in the Nicholson Street timber yard in smallamounts. All could have found appropriate use in some kind of cabinetry.

A piece of furniture need not be made entirely of prime wood, and rarely was. In the parlor of the Brush-Everard House in Williamsburg, for example, stands a sofa made in Philadelphia about 1770; it has eight legs that show, made of mahogany, and a frame that does not show, constructed of chestnut, maple, pine, and tulip poplar. Not every article can boast so many secondary woods, though the colonial cabinetmaker had a wide choice. The secretary-bookcase in the library of the same house was possibly made in Williamsburg and shows the more usual combination of walnut and pine as primary and secondary woods.

Colonial cabinetmakers customarily selected a secondary wood that answered the construction requirements of the article in question and that was locally available and therefore cheap. The secondary wood in a piece of colonial furniture is often the best clue to the place where it was made. Yellow pine and tulip poplar were most often used in Virginia and the other southern colonies; Hay and his successors would doubtless have stocked goodly amounts of both, and very likely also some white cedar and cypress.

Probably no list of the materials that might have been used in colonial cabinetry can hope to be complete. None, certainly, could pretend to completeness that did not include a word about nails, screws, glue, and cabinet hardware.

The colonial cabinetmaker used heated animal glue regularly. It was indispensable for veneering; for attaching carved surfaces and ornaments to their plain foundations it was almost as important; and any joint, however carefully made, was stouter for a bit of adhesive.

The eighteenth-century upholsterer, of course, could not have done his work without brass tacks, and quantitiesof them have been found in the course of archaeological excavation at the site of the Hay-Bucktrout-Dickinson cabinet shop on Nicholson Street. The colonial cabinetmaker sometimes used small nails for such special purposes as attaching drawer guides. But he would no more have nailed together a piece of furniture than would his modern counterpart. Screws he did use, for attaching cleats, braces, hinges, or other hardware. He used as few as possible, however, since all screws were handmade, probably imported, and certainly not cheap. If a joint needed to be reinforced, he used wooden pegs, not screws. (Treenails, used in house framing, were simply large pegs.)

Even the simplest piece of case furniture—such as a chest, press, bookcase, clock case, dressing table, or sideboard—needed at least one lock and possibly a set of hinges before it could leave the cabinetmaker’s hands as a finished article. These items of hardware could be of iron on the cruder examples of cabinet work or of brass on the better ones. The door handles, drawer pulls, escutcheon plates, and other visible hardware on finer pieces were almost sure to be of brass, to be designed for ornament as well as utility, and to be imported.

A number of brass hardware items—whole and cut-down hinges and escutcheon plates in particular—have been excavated at the site of the Hay shop, most of them in ground levels associated with Dickinson’s tenure. These seem to say that Dickinson was accustomed to working with fine furniture.

A great deal of authentic eighteenth-century furniture—both English and American in origin—has been assembled for display in the Exhibition Buildings of restored Williamsburg. The collection is acknowledged to be one of the finest in the country. Unfortunately, it contains not one stick of furniture that can be positively identified as coming from the hand of a Williamsburg cabinetmaker.

We do have, however, many bits and pieces of documentary evidence about various Williamsburg cabinetmakers of the colonial era and about the kind of work they did. A number of them, for example, advertised their services in the columns of theVirginia Gazettefrom time to time. Practitioners of other crafts often listed at great length the wares they made and sold; but the cabinetmakers usually announced only that they stood ready to make to order any kind of furniture. They were confidently versatile, it would seem; that they kept busy making and doing all sorts of things is corroborated by other scraps of written and printed information.

Joshua Kendall, when he set up shop in Williamsburg, offered to make “VenetianSUN BLINDS for windows.”

Venetian blinds were widely made and used in both the Old World and the New. This how-to-do-it illustration also comes from Diderot’s encyclopedia.

In 1755 Peter Scott announced that he intended to leave for England and would sell his house and lots, “Two Negroes, bred to the Business of a Cabinet-Maker,” and “sundry Pieces of Cabinet Work, of Mahogany and Walnut, consisting of Desks, Book-Cases, Tables of various Sorts, Tools, and some Materials.” Apparently his plan did not materialize, for when he died 20 years later his estate included “A great variety of cabinet makers tools, Mahogany, Walnut, Pine Plank, like wise new walnut book cases, desks, tables, &c.”

From personal account books of John Mercer, lawyer, and Robert Carter of Nomini Hall, planter and councilor, we know that Scott made a set of book shelves for the former and twice repaired tables for him, and that he made two card tables, one sideboard, and four picture frames for the latter.

In 1772 Benjamin Bucktrout submitted a bill for services to the same Robert Carter of Nomini Hall. It is worth quoting in full:

Three years later Edmund Dickinson rendered a similar statement:

The Estate Colo John PrentisTo Edmund B. Dickinson Dr

The Estate Colo John Prentis

To Edmund B. Dickinson Dr

Putting together these and other bits and pieces, several conclusions seem warranted: Williamsburg cabinetmakers made furniture not only to order but for open sale in their shops; they probably spent more time repairing furniture than in making it; they were by no means too proud to undertake such incidental jobs as putting up and taking down bedsteads and curtains. Finally, they were capable of producing any and all of the major items of furniture: chairs, beds, chests, desks, bookcases, clothes and china presses, tables, and candlestands.

While perhaps not all of them would have had occasion to make every variety of the less common articles, some doubtless were called on for spinning wheels, bootjacks, bowls and trenchers, cradles, toys, tools, coffins, spice chests, fire screens, music stands, trunks, cellarettes, looking-glass frames, and so on and on.

Every swing in London fashions in clothing, music, wigs, and the decorative arts was normally echoed a few years later by a similar but muted swing in colonial fashions. In each case the peak of the vogue (not necessarily the first evidence of it) in the colonies came a decade or two after the same style had reached its height in London.

The eighteenth century was the golden age of furniture design in England. The decorative tastes of the Restoration and of the reign of William and Mary set the stage for the appearance at the opening of the century of the curvaceous style known as Queen Anne. There followed a succession of partly overlapping, sometimes ill-defined and sometimes distinct styles in English furniture design and interior design. These succeeding fashions have since become known by the names of reigning monarchs or of men whose books of collected designs set or summarized the predominant taste of the years in question. We know these styles, and style periods, as early and late Georgian, Chippendale, Adam, Hepplewhite, and Sheraton.

In the American colonies the Queen Anne style did not come into full flower until 1725 or thereabouts. The “decorated Queen Anne” or early Georgian substyles cannot be clearly discerned in colonial furniture before the advent of “Chippendale” influence, about 1750, swept all before it. Thomas Chippendale’s famousGentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, published in 1754, was but one of a number of books of designs issued in London and widely used in colonial cabinetmaking shops. It was foremost among them, however. And even if such characteristic features of colonial Chippendale as the claw-and-ball foot, for example, do not appear in Chippendale’s book, his name has become a label—perhaps ill-fitting—for the whole middle period of colonial furniture making.

Chairs.Three design chairs—the one to the right offering alternative treatments of certain details—from Chippendale’sGentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director: Being a large Collection of the Most Elegant and Useful Designs of Household Furniture, in the Most Fashionable Taste. (Third edition, London, 1762)

Chairs.

Three design chairs—the one to the right offering alternative treatments of certain details—from Chippendale’sGentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director: Being a large Collection of the Most Elegant and Useful Designs of Household Furniture, in the Most Fashionable Taste. (Third edition, London, 1762)

This period lasted through the Revolution; the wartime breach of relations with England all but cut off the transfer to America of the Adam style that was the rage of Londonin the 1770’s. After the Revolution the designs of George Hepplewhite and, late in the century, Thomas Sheraton followed the usual route across the Atlantic.

Throughout the century, too, some regional differences can be discerned. New England followed old England in social customs and tastes but with a tinge of stateliness and a restraint of design in furniture that may have had distant Puritan ancestry. In New York, certainly, the ideas of the original Dutch settlers persisted in coloring later English influences in matters of taste. German immigrants to Pennsylvania brought sturdy non-English preferences to the areas they settled outside Philadelphia. The city itself, of course, always remained a cosmopolitan center—if a somewhat sober one—whose furniture showed the English origins of many of its chief makers.

The southern colonies, and particularly Virginia, were more closely tied to the mother country in sentiment and economy than were the others. Virginians, therefore, probably mirrored English tastes more faithfully than many of their compatriots.

English products were so much admired in Virginia, in fact, and so easily obtained by those who could afford choice things, that the local artisan had little chance to compete. Whether cause or consequence of this lack of demand for their services, Virginia cabinetmakers appear to have been less highly skilled and less highly schooled in the craft than their colleagues in London and in a number of large colonial cities. There was no “school” of cabinetry in eighteenth-century Williamsburg such as developed in Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and elsewhere.

A Virginian who wanted fine furniture might order it from one of these cities. More likely, he would buy it at a sale of “venture” furniture made in a northern or middle colony and shipped south to be sold for the best price it would bring. Or, he could send to England for his wants.

This was not so difficult a transaction as might at first appear. Tobacco was the source of Virginia’s wealth, and tobacco had to be shipped to England for sale. The typical large Tidewater planter consigned his annual crop to an English merchant who received, handled, and sold it. After expense deductions, the balance in the merchant’s hands represented the planter’s profits.

What was more natural than to spend it right there in England? Articles of English make were thought (usually with reason) to be of better material and workmanship than “country made” pieces, and they were undeniably more in fashion. The tobacco ships were returning to Virginia anyway, needed freight for their holds, and could unload almost at the planter’s front door. As a result of these circumstances, it was customary to send with each shipment of tobacco an order for goods to be sent back.

This dependence on the English market did not prevail—at least to the same extent—outside of the Chesapeake Bay area. In consequence, cabinetmakers as far apart as Boston and Charleston produced to order some very fine pieces of furniture. Some few examples bear the maker’s signature or shop label; others can be identified with confidence because of characteristic traits in their design or execution. Cabinetmakers of the Townsend-Goddard dynasty in Newport, Rhode Island, produced block-fronted and shell-carved case pieces that sparkle in many museums today. Thomas Affleck, Jonathan Gostelowe, Benjamin Randolph, and others in Philadelphia made that city a center of pre-Revolutionary cabinetry, and created the “Philadelphia Chippendale” school of furniture design.

Virginia cabinetmakers, too, rarely labeled or signed their products; or if they did, the products have not survived in more than a very few examples. What is known to be of Virginia origin is rarely ornate. The examples to be seen in Williamsburg today, for instance, are truly provincial: sturdy, generally well-proportioned, capably made, and inclined to be simple in decoration.

In two of the bedrooms at the Brush-Everard House in Williamsburg and in one at the Raleigh Tavern stand commodious pieces of furniture that today would probably have to be called cupboards. The eighteenth-century housewife called them clothes presses, and they served her as a place to keep the family’s entire supply of bedding and clothing not in daily use.

Two of these pieces are extremely simple in design, so simple that they may be said to lack any conscious “design” at all. Some two hundred years of use testify to the sturdiness of their construction; but they were clearly not made for show. The third—the one in the ground floor bedroom of the Brush-Everard House—is more sophisticated. It is of mahogany and southern pine rather than of walnut and pine as are the other two. It has ogee-curved bracket feet instead of straight bracket feet. And it boasts a nicely made fretwork cornice.

These touches do not make it a distinguished piece of furniture or an overly beautiful one. However, the importance of these three pieces lies not in their appearance, but rather in the fact that all three have been handed down from generation to generation in the Galt family of Williamsburg and are believed to have been made by one of the town’s eighteenth-century cabinetmakers.

Samuel Galt followed the watchmaking and silversmithing craft in Williamsburg from 1750 until his death. His older son, James, was also a silversmith until he became, in 1770, the first “keeper” of the “Lunatick Hospital” in Williamsburg. The younger son, John Minson Galt, acquired a medical education in Edinburgh and London, then became a partner in Dr. James Pasteur’s apothecary and chirurgical establishment in Williamsburg.

Unfortunately the Galt family tradition does not say which of Williamsburg’s eighteenth-century craftsmen created the articles in question. The most prominentpre-Revolutionary cabinetmakers were all active during some part of the period when the Galts, father and sons, were founding the family’s name and fame. It is possible, judging from appearance alone, that the two simpler pieces could have been made for the earliest Galt by the earliest (known) cabinetmaker, Peter Scott, while the third was constructed for a later and more pretentious household by a later craftsman, perhaps Edmund Dickinson.

Dickinson was well equipped to make better furniture than any of these three clothes presses. An apprentice in Anthony Hay’s cabinet shop on Nicholson Street, he may have stayed on as journeyman during Benjamin Bucktrout’s proprietorship of the shop and timber yard. In any case, he became master of the establishment himself in 1771. Seven years later, serving as an officer in the Revolutionary army, he was killed at the Battle of Monmouth.

The appraisers of Dickinson’s estate—one of them was Bucktrout—valued his possessions at the respectable total of £164 6s.6d.About £20 of this represented Dickinson’s library of 40 volumes. Some of these had probably been gathered by Hay in the first place, but it was still a large and wide-ranging collection of books for a craftsman. In addition to a copy of “Chippendale’s Designs” valued by itself at £6, there were books of poetry and history, English and French dictionaries, and many volumes of theTatler, theSpectator, and theConnoisseur.

Another section of the Dickinson inventory demands particular attention here: the list of the cabinetmaker’s tools. These were valued by the appraisers at close to £50, and included 81 planes of different sorts, 11 saws, one stock or brace and 20 bits, 63 chisels and gouges, four clamps and a bench vise, a dozen miscellaneous items, and a tool box.

A cabinetmaker’s workbench and a variety of woodworking tools of the eighteenth century. Among them may be seen several bench planes, two kinds of frame saw, an assortment of chisels, some measuring and marking tools, a brace and bit, gimlets, etc. This illustration is taken from Joseph Moxon’sMechanick Exercises,published in London in 1683.

No doubt most of these tools were made in England, though the inventory does not say so. Perhaps all of them were. Three years before Dickinson became master of his shop—just about the time he would have been acquiring many of his tools—John Blair, the acting governor of the colony, reported to the Board of Trade in London that:

Our pig-iron and some bar-iron is chiefly shipped to Britain. We do not make a saw, augur, gimlet, file or nails, nor steel; and most tools in the country are imported from Britain.

The inventory does not list hammers, files, or rasps of any kind, which is surprising as they would have been normal and necessary equipment in any woodworking shop—and a number of the latter have been found at the site of the Hay-Dickinson shop. Perhaps the appraisers overlooked them.

However, the inventory does not list workbenches or lathes either, which is the more surprising. A workbench is an absolute necessity for cabinet work, a lathe only a little less so, and neither is likely to be overlooked. It may be that the appraisers did not list them as tools because they were deemed to be permanent shop fixtures. At any rate, while we have no proof that Dickinson owned either a bench or a lathe, reason says he would have had at least one of each. Matthew Tuell, a carpenter, owned a wheel lathe and turning tools; and the partnership of Honey & Harrocks owned lathes, did their own turning, and possibly turned for other cabinetmakers.

Eighteenth-century lathes were machine tools of a sort but not “power tools” since human muscle provided their motive force. Three varieties can be seen in the reconstructed cabinet shop in Williamsburg: the bow lathe, the treadle lathe, and the great wheel lathe. The last named is the most impressive and the most effective, turning up some 700 rpm on the spindle with a good strong apprentice cranking the large wheel.

The power woodworking lathe today is a considerably more complicated machine, but the fundamental principles involved in wood turning have not changed. Similarly, in the other great category of woodworking tools—hand tools—each separate operation is accomplished in precisely the same way by tools that are basically the same as they were in the eighteenth century, or even in the eighteenth century B.C.

Turner.A turner, whose treadle lathe spins at different speeds according to which spindle pulley is used for the drive belt. This picture is taken fromThe Book of Trades or Library of Useful Arts,first American edition, published by Jacob Johnson and sold in his bookstores in Philadelphia and Richmond in 1807. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

Turner.

A turner, whose treadle lathe spins at different speeds according to which spindle pulley is used for the drive belt. This picture is taken fromThe Book of Trades or Library of Useful Arts,first American edition, published by Jacob Johnson and sold in his bookstores in Philadelphia and Richmond in 1807. Courtesy, Library of Congress.

With obvious exceptions, all woodworking tools are intended primarily to remove small amounts of material by some kind of cutting or tearing action. With this simple fact in mind, it is no surprise to learn that saws, planes, chisels, and boring tools found in ancient Egyptian tombs, or depicted by artists of that time, were not significantly different from those of the eighteenth century after Christ. (Examples of furniture made in ancient Egypt, incidentally, still exist, the oldest known articles being stools dating at least from the First Dynasty—3500 B.C.!) Nor should it be surprising to find that the colonial cabinetmaker’s tools, although cruder and less convenient than those sold in a modern hardware store, were fundamentally the same and did the same jobs in the same ways. Furthermore, in the hands of a skilled craftsman the eighteenth-century tools performed their assigned tasks every bit as well as do their twentieth-century counterparts.

If it appears that Dickinson’s 81 planes were far more than any cabinetmaker needed, the number is easily explained by the likelihood that only a few were “bench planes,” the rest being “fitting-planes” or specially shaped “molding planes.”

Then as now the bench plane category included a group of flat-bottomed planes used for smoothing, leveling, and squaring pieces of wood. Varying in length from the smoothing plane of about 6 inches to the jointer of perhaps 30 inches, the group included also the trying plane, long plane, fore plane, jack plane, and strike block.

Fitting planes were those—each designed for a particular purpose—used to prepare pieces of wood for fitting together.This group included planes for making rabbets, tongues, grooves, and similar shapes, and having such names as the plough, match, fillister, and moving fillister. The last was essentially a rabbet plane with an adjustable fence to guide the width of its cut, often an adjustable stop to regulate the depth of cut, and sometimes a routing bit or tooth just ahead of the leading edge of the main blade.

The third and largest group in any eighteenth-century tool collection included the molding planes for producing ornamental trim in an almost infinite variety of shapes. In the absence of machine-made millwork in stock sizes and profiles, the colonial woodworker had to produce his own. In some instances, he may even have made his own molding planes first.

The eighteenth-century plane was a simple but effective device. It had only three basic parts: a body, an iron, and a wedge. The body or “stock” was a rectangular block of beech (or some other hard wood) with a shaped vertical opening through the center. The iron, inserted into this opening, was held at the proper pitch and blade exposure by tapping the wedge tightly into position. Handles were usually attached to the larger planes.

On a bench plane the bottom or sole of the stock was flat, of course, and this was particularly important for a jointer, whose sole had to be perfectly true. But the sole of a molding plane was shaped to fit the curve or angle or combination of surfaces its blade would produce. Since even a simple quarter-round molding might on occasion be needed in several different sizes for different uses, the well-equipped cabinetmaker would need perhaps nine planes right there.

George Washington’s well-known order of goods from London for the furnishing of Mount Vernon in 1759 included in a long list of tools not only a considerable number of bench and fitting planes, but about 50 molding planes: “10 pr Hollows & Rounds, 4 two Square Asticles [astragals], 6 Ogees, 1 Snipes Bill, 4 Quarter Rounds, 4 Sash Plains, 3 Bead Ditto, 6 Ovelos.” To these a cabinetmaker would have added ogive, reed, flute, beaded flute, fillet and fascia combinations, and other molding profiles favored on eighteenth-century furniture. Remembering that a number of these shapes too, might have been needed in more than one size, Dickinson’s 81 planes begin to seem hardly enough.

Several shapes of molding planes, with the irons of corresponding profile; also a moving fillister in the lower part of the picture. This illustration and the two that follow it are taken from a three-volume eighteenth-century French manual on woodworking by Andre-Jacob Roubo.

Back to Index Next