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 involved the 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; and _Benjamin Bucktrout_, 1766-78, whose funeral side line became the chief business of his posterity in Williamsburg for several generations. _PRIME FURNITURE WOODS_