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

Giving Attention to the City’s chief Craftsmen in the Furniture Way; and to their Tools & Methods of Working.
As interpreted by JOHANNES HEUVEL Master Cabinetmaker of Colonial Williamsburg
Williamsburg Craft Series
WILLIAMSBURG Published by Colonial Williamsburg MCMLXIX
The most historic piece of furniture in historic Williamsburg today is the throne-like Speaker’s Chair that stands in the far end of the House of Burgesses.
It is the very same chair that stood there when the portly Peyton Randolph was speaker of the House, and men like George Mason and Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry raised aloft in that chamber the banner of human liberty.
The same chair was probably there in 1759, too, when a newly elected burgess stood in his place to receive the plaudits of the House for his bravery in the French and Indian War. From it Speaker John Robinson came to the embarrassed young man’s rescue with the words: “Sit down, Mr. Washington; your modesty is equal to your valour, and that surpasses the power of any language I possess.”
Perhaps the Speaker’s Chair was among the “several other things” that were saved—along with the colony’s records and the portraits of the royal family—when flames gutted the Capitol in 1747. If so, this chair may be the very one installed when the Capitol building was first completed in 1705. The Assembly had specified that the burgesses’ chamber should “be furnished with a large Armed Chair for the Speaker to sit in, and a cushion stuft with hair Suitable to it.”
Because of these historic associations the Speaker’s Chair may seem a most fitting key to open this account of furniture making in colonial Williamsburg. Its true aptness to the topic, however, lies in other circumstances: No one knows who made the chair or where it was made or even when it was made. And this kind of uncertainty pervades the entire subject of cabinetmaking in eighteenth-century Virginia.
A sketch of the Speaker’s Chair, reproduced full size from the 1777 journal of Ebenezer Hazard, a New England bookseller, historian, and surveyor general of the Post Office.