Part 2

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 famous _Gentleman 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.

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 London in 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.

_APRON-STRING EFFECTS_

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.

_MADE IN WILLIAMSBURG?_

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 prominent pre-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 6_s._ 6_d._ 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 the _Tatler_, the _Spectator_, and the _Connoisseur_.

_THE COMPLEAT TOOL CHEST_

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.

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.

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.

_PLAIN PLANES AND FANCY ONES_

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.

_BIG SAWS AND LITTLE CHISELS_

The familiar carpenter's handsaw, with a blade wide and stiff enough to cut on the push stroke, was not unknown in colonial times and Dickinson apparently had one. But various kinds of frame and back saws were much more common. Dickinson had one large frame saw--its valuation at £5 indicates it must have been of good quality as well as good-sized--that was probably a pit saw. This was a two-man affair for ripping logs into boards. A whip saw (one of these was also listed) was like a modern two-man crosscut saw.

Dickinson also possessed a small frame saw, a bow saw, a "tenant" (tenon) saw, a panel saw, a sash saw, and three dovetail saws. The latter three, called "dovetailed" in the inventory, were back saws with short blades and very fine teeth. The tenon saw might have been either a back or a frame saw, as both varieties were used in cutting the tenons for mortise joints. Vagaries in craft nomenclature leave us in doubt about the precise appearance of many tools, including Dickinson's panel and sash saws.

Except that it was doubtless made of wood rather than steel and had a somewhat different chuck, Dickinson's bit stock would have resembled the boring brace in any modern tool box. His "20 bitts," however, probably lacked the spiral shank of their present descendants and thus required considerably more skill on the part of the user to bore a straight hole.

Chisels and gouges, of which Dickinson had a total of 53, have not changed in appearance or structure over many centuries. Like other tools, they come in different shapes and sizes and some possess special designs for special purposes. Of Dickinson's collection, 47 were carving chisels and gouges, which argues that he did his own carving. However, one of the two carvers known to have worked in eighteenth-century Williamsburg was George Hamilton, a journeyman in Dickinson's shop in 1774. The other, James Wilson, worked with or for Anthony Hay some twenty years earlier.

Dickinson's "6 Morticeing Chissels"--along with his "tenant" saw and fitting planes--serve as reminders that the basic techniques of cabinetmaking have likewise changed little through the years.

In the making of an article of furniture the component pieces must be attached to each other at various points: sometimes side-by-side with grain running parallel, sometimes end to end, or end into side, or crossing one another. At each juncture the cabinetmaker had his choice of a number of joints that were appropriate in such a situation. The eighteenth-century craftsman knew them all and was skilled in the making of all those used today: butt, lap, rabbet, tongue and groove, mortise and tenon, mitre, dado, dovetail, and their numerous combinations and variations.

In cabinetmaking the most useful joints are undoubtedly the mortise and tenon and the dovetail, the former for joining structural members at right angles, the latter for holding together adjacent sides of drawers, chests, boxes, and the like. Both kinds of joints are very strong if well made, weak if poorly fitted. Skill and experience, thus, were (and are) prerequisite to good furniture making.

_ON THE SURFACE_

Some veneering appeared on colonial furniture at least by the beginning of the eighteenth century. But it was not widely practiced, in part because fine cabinet woods were relatively cheap and in part, no doubt, because making veneer by hand required a good deal of skilled work and labor was relatively expensive. In any case, it was the large and otherwise unadorned surfaces of Hepplewhite and Sheraton furniture that invited matched veneering. Since these fashions came to America after the Revolution and after Williamsburg had passed its apogee, Williamsburg cabinetmakers probably did little if any veneering.

Applying a finish to woodwork is an ancient art and has always served two purposes: to give the wood a protective coating and to enhance its appearance. By the eighteenth century the techniques for applying several different kinds of finish were well understood and widely used in the colonial cabinet shop.

Painting, generally limited to the cheapest sort of furniture, was little practiced by quality cabinetmakers. The imitation of oriental lacquer called japanning was not common in the colonies, and in any case was the province of the japanner. The cabinetmaker favored oil, wax, or varnish finishes to produce a hard, transparent, and glassy-smooth surface.

To prepare the surface of the wood, colonial cabinetmakers had planes, scrapers, glasspaper, and sandpaper--the latter two available by the late eighteenth century and probably much before that. Stains were used to enrich the natural color and emphasize the grain of the wood, and pulverized chalk, plaster of Paris, or the like was used to fill the pores of coarse-grained woods.

Wax, usually beeswax melted and mixed with turpentine, was cheap, easy to apply, and easy to renew. Rubbed on, allowed to dry, and polished with a cloth--and repeated by generations of industrious housewives or servants--wax produced a beautiful finish, especially on mahogany or cherry.

Linseed oil thinned with turpentine was frequently the only finish applied on these and other hard, close-grained woods. The mixture was applied generously, allowed to stand for several hours, and wiped off. The surface was then rubbed for hours with the bare hand or a piece of cloth or felt, and the process was repeated again and again until the wood showed a fine rich sheen.

As the wood absorbed the oil its grain rose slightly and had to be smoothed down again between coats. Sheraton advocated a technique that combined filling, oiling, and smoothing in one operation: the oil was poured on and allowed to stand, then sprinkled with fine brick dust and rubbed with a cloth. The brick dust filled the grain and combined with the oil to form a putty that was mildly abrasive and would, Sheraton said, "secure a fine polish by continued rubbing."

Eighteenth-century cabinetmakers employed both oil varnishes and spirit varnishes. The former was made by dissolving a natural resin--copal was one of the most commonly used--in hot oil and thinning with turpentine. The only spirit varnish of importance was that made of lac--in the form of stick lac, seed lac, or shell lac--dissolved in alcohol. (Lac is the resinous secretion of an insect encrusted on the twigs of certain East Indian trees.)

The application of a varnish required less labor than wax or oil but more skill. It was flowed on, allowed to dry, and rubbed down with a fine abrasive. This was repeated with as many coats as might be necessary, and wax applied as a final coat. Eighteenth-century Anglo-American cabinetmakers seem to have preferred lac varnishes, particularly shellac, for walnut furniture, wax and oil finishes for mahogany.

_WILLIAMSBURG WORKSHOPS_

The elegant grounds of the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg seem at first glance a most unlikely site for a cabinetmaker's shop, especially in the time of Lord Dunmore. His Majesty's last and unlamented viceroy in Virginia was no basement do-it-yourselfer. But after the Revolution his claim for the value of lost possessions included "A quantity of Mahogany and other Woods; with tools for four Cabinet Makers."