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. _GOODLY TALL TREES_ “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.