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A Cultural Analysis of Furniture-Making in Petersburg, Virginia, 1760-1820

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A Cultural Analysis of Furniture-Making in Petersburg, Virginia, 1760-1820 W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 1993 A Cultural Analysis of Furniture-Making in Petersburg, Virginia, 1760-1820 Johnathan Prown College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Art and Design Commons Recommended Citation Prown, Johnathan, "A Cultural Analysis of Furniture-Making in Petersburg, Virginia, 1760-1820" (1993). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539625793. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-hgmp-nx78 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF FURNITURE-MAKING IN PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA, 1760 TO 1820 A Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of American Studies The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Jonathan Prown 1993 This thesis is submitted in partial fulfillment the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts * Jonathan Prown Approved, May 1993 ^ ^ / v Barbara Carson William Graham Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Ronald Hurst Colonial Williamsburg Foundation This project is dedicated to Dr. Katherine Hemple Prown, whose constant encouragement served as my inspiration and whose considerable editorial talents helped make my untamed prose presentable. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................... ............ v ABSTRACT................................................................................................................ v i INTRODUCTION..................................................................................................... 2 CHAPTER I. FROM TRADING POST TO COMMERCIAL CENTER: THE EMERGENCE OF THE TOWN 6 CHAPTER II. PRE-REVOLUTIONARY TRADE IN PETERSBURG: AN ANALYSIS OF FURNITURE-MAKING 28 CHAPTER III. THE ECONOMIC AFFECTS OF THE WAR AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENTS TO 1800 .......................... 48 CHAPTER IV. FURNITURE-MAKING FROM 1780-1800: LOCAL AND REGIONAL EXPANSION.................... 57 CHAPTER V. PETERSBURG IN THE EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY......................................................................... 71 CHAPTER VI. THE RISE AND FALL OF THE FURNITURE TRADES: 1800-1820 ..................................................... 82 CONCLUSION ...................................................................................... 105 APPENDIX A BIOGRAPHIC SKETCHES............................................. 108 APPENDICES B - G SELECTED WILLS AND INVENTORIES.................... 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 224 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Without the research data available at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, this work could not have been completed, and I am deeply indebted to the museum staff, both past and present, including Forsyth Alexander, Whaley Batson, John Bivins, Jr., Madeline Moeller, Bradford L. Rauschenberg, and Martha Rowe. I owe a special thanks to the museum's founder, Frank L. Horton, who continues to guide its research mission. Extensive insight and editorial assistance were offered by Ronald L. Hurst, William Graham, and Graham S. Hood of Colonial Williamsburg and Barbara G. Carson of the College of William & Mary. Sumpter T. Priddy, III generously shared his extensive research on Virginia furniture-making. The archival staff at the Virginia State Library were both helpful and patient with my many requests, as was the curatorial staff at the Virginia Historical Society. Thanks also to William G. Beville and Patrick H. Booth of Petersburg for their enthusiastic assistance, and to the many wonderful Petropolitans and other Virginians who shared their personal collections. Many others contributed to this project, including Marshall Bullock, Dianne Dunkley, Marshall Goodman, Wallace B. Gusler, Nancy Hagedom, Julian Hudson, Robert Jones, photographers Hans Lorenz and Craig McDougal, Betty Crowe Leviner, Richard L. Miller, Anne Marie Price, Suzanne Savory, Susan Shames, Karen Steele. My apologies to those whom I may have inadvertently overlooked. v ABSTRACT Situated just below the falls of the Appomattox River and surrounded by fertile tobacco land, Petersburg, Virginia, emerged during the middle of the eighteenth century as an important cultural and economic center, a role that has, to date, been largely overlooked by historians and decorative arts scholars. Integral to Petersburg’s early economy was a wide range of mercantile operations and trade shops, and surviving evidence strongly suggests that the town supported an extensive furniture community. This study considers the evolution of furniture making in Petersburg between 1760 and 1820 and concludes that it was inextricably bound to larger cultural patterns and directly affected by a variety of local, national, and international events. In addition, this study also strives to add Petersburg's craft legacy to the existing body of scholarship on furniture making in the South. A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF FURNITURE-MAKING IN PETERSBURG, VIRGINIA: 1760-1820 INTRODUCTION This study is designed to provide a cultural foundation upon which more detailed analyses of Petersburg furniture making traditions can be formed. My main goal is not to identify as many local furniture groups as possible; I offer that diagnostic and fully illustrated study in an article that comprises the entire May 1992 issue of the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts. Instead I here subordinate the question "what did Petersburg furniture look like?," to questions like "why did it look the way it did?," "who made it?," "what traditions influenced it?" and "what larger cultural patterns does it reveal?." By adopting such an approach, I intend to move beyond the limited perspective of traditional formal analyses, in which the products of early American artisans have often been considered only as discrete, acultural, aesthetic expressions. Essential to this study, then, is the idea that objects are created within and because of their specific cultural parameters. Accordingly, Petersburg furniture made between 1760 and 1820 not only represents specific artistic and technical traditions, but also broader social, economic and demographic trends. To paraphrase Dell Upton, Petersburg furniture is only as interesting as the people who made it.^ Previous furniture studies, notably Ronald L. Hurst's Cabinetmakers and Related Tradesmen in Norfolk. Virginia: 1770-1820. have successfully combined the methodologies of several disciplines--including those of historians, economists, and art historians--to reach meaningful conclusions 1 Dell Upton, Holy Things and Profane: Anglican Parish Churches in Colonial V irginia. (New York: The Architectural History Foundation, 1986), p. xxii. 3 about the role of early American furniture makers.2 By first identifying the local furniture making traditions and then placing them in a broader socio­ economic context, Hurst discerns significant patterns which relate the artisans and their work to the world they lived in. By employing this paradigm, the manufactures of early Petersburg furniture makers should emerge as the logical cultural expressions of artisans working in a rapidly evolving Tidewater city in which systems of trade and commerce were fatefully bound to local and trans-Atlantic patterns of production and consum ption.3 Hurst's identification of Norfolk's specific craft traditions and their relationship to larger cultural patterns mirrors Dell Upton’s analysis of Virginia's Anglican Churches, which convincingly argues that regio-specific material culture studies must document the local context and then work out, rather than fitting the subject to a general or preconceived theoretical fram ew ork.4 Upton's method, like Hurst's, strongly suggests that an important urban center like Petersburg developed idiosyncratic craft traditions which, once identified, can be correlated with larger cultural patterns. Prior to the Revolutionary War Petersburg, like the rest of eastern Virginia, retained strong cultural and economic ties to Britain. From the earliest years of the colony, British financial interests guided Virginia's development. Of essential concern was the creation of an economically 2 Ronald L. Hurst, "Cabinetmakers and Related Tradesmen in Norfolk, Virginia: 1770-1820," Master's Thesis, College of William & Mary, 1989. 3 In this study, Williamsburg, Norfolk, Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg are referred to as "Tidewater" towns. The last three, arguably, could be labeled "Piedmont" towns because of their primary role as market centers for inland counties. They are here being called Tidewater to indicate not only their intimate socio-economic connections with Virginia's eastern urban centers and but also their direct participation with international trade netw orks. 4 Upton, p. xxii. 4 connected network of towns modeled on the British system.5 What evolved in the early years of the colony, however, was a landscape marked by a distinct lack of cities and smaller towns. Tobacco became the primary focal point of colonial Virginia's economy, which required massive amounts of arable land and a large, unskilled work force. Low population densities, the cyclical character of the tobacco
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