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.