The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: Giving Attention to the City's Chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way; And to Their Tools & Methods of WorkingHeuvel, Johannes
History
The Cabinetmaker in Eighteenth-Century Williamsburg: Giving Attention to the City's Chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way; And to Their Tools & Methods of Working
Heuvel, Johannes
Furniture making; Furniture workers -- Virginia -- Williamsburg; Furniture, Colonial -- Virginia -- Williamsburg
As we have seen, Virginians who wanted fine furniture probably ordered
it from England. But competition from across the Atlantic was not the
local cabinetmaker’s only burden. A very large amount of furniture left
the busy shops of New England, New York, and Philadelphia in the
eighteenth century, consigned to southern ports or the West Indies. No
precise figure can be stated for the size or importance of this
coastwise trade, or for its importance in the life of Williamsburg
cabinetmakers; it could not have made things easier for them.
[Illustration: _The interior of an eighteenth-century French
marquetry establishment, with the workers using various tools. At
the left is a type of vise called a “donkey”; against the wall may
be seen a large cabinet bookcase, a slant-top desk, and a chest of
drawers. These would have been made in a cabinet shop and brought
here for inlay decoration._
DIDEROT]
Whether outside competition was the cause, or simply the narrowness of
the Virginia market in the first place, Williamsburg cabinetmakers—like
the practitioners of other crafts—found ways to augment their incomes.
Anthony Hay became proprietor of the Raleigh Tavern and Benjamin
Bucktrout turned storekeeper and state functionary.
The change in Hay’s case was clearly not motivated by poverty; he must
have been well-to-do or at any rate well respected to have acquired
backing, perhaps to the extent of £4000, to buy the Raleigh—and without
selling his house, cabinet shop, and timber yard.
Coffin-making was a normal part of the cabinetmaker’s business, and many
cabinetmakers took what was the logical next step of serving also as
funeral directors. When the popular Lord Botetourt, Governor Dunmore’s
predecessor, died in Williamsburg, two of the town’s cabinetmakers were
involved in the burial. Joshua Kendall made the three nested coffins,
and Benjamin Bucktrout provided the hearse and four days worth of
attendance in connection with the ceremonies.
Bucktrout was one of the several Williamsburg cabinetmakers who did
upholstering; he also sold upholstery materials in his shop on Francis
Street. By 1774 that shop had become a store—stocked with beer, cheese,
spices, woolens and cottons, hats, boots, women’s and children’s shoes,
gloves, guns, pistols, saddles, whips, and a number of other things—and
Bucktrout had to advertise that he still did cabinet work.
Eventually, however, Bucktrout seems to have abandoned his own business
to put all his time and effort into serving as purveyor to the public
hospitals of the state. A powder mill he devised and erected in or near
Williamsburg early in the Revolution did not function for lack of
saltpeter, and Bucktrout’s efforts to gain compensation or subsidy from
the Assembly were in vain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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