Probably no list of the materials that might have been used in colonial cabinetry can hope to be complete. None, certainly, could pretend to completeness that did not include a word about nails, screws, glue, and cabinet hardware.
The colonial cabinetmaker used heated animal glue regularly. It was indispensable for veneering; for attaching carved surfaces and ornaments to their plain foundations it was almost as important; and any joint, however carefully made, was stouter for a bit of adhesive.
The eighteenth-century upholsterer, of course, could not have done his work without brass tacks, and quantities of them have been found in the course of archaeological excavation at the site of the Hay-Bucktrout-Dickinson cabinet shop on Nicholson Street. The colonial cabinetmaker sometimes used small nails for such special purposes as attaching drawer guides. But he would no more have nailed together a piece of furniture than would his modern counterpart. Screws he did use, for attaching cleats, braces, hinges, or other hardware. He used as few as possible, however, since all screws were handmade, probably imported, and certainly not cheap. If a joint needed to be reinforced, he used wooden pegs, not screws. (Treenails, used in house framing, were simply large pegs.)
Even the simplest piece of case furniture—such as a chest, press, bookcase, clock case, dressing table, or sideboard—needed at least one lock and possibly a set of hinges before it could leave the cabinetmaker’s hands as a finished article. These items of hardware could be of iron on the cruder examples of cabinet work or of brass on the better ones. The door handles, drawer pulls, escutcheon plates, and other visible hardware on finer pieces were almost sure to be of brass, to be designed for ornament as well as utility, and to be imported.
A number of brass hardware items—whole and cut-down hinges and escutcheon plates in particular—have been excavated at the site of the Hay shop, most of them in ground levels associated with Dickinson’s tenure. These seem to say that Dickinson was accustomed to working with fine furniture.
SCRAPS OF EVIDENCE
A great deal of authentic eighteenth-century furniture—both English and American in origin—has been assembled for display in the Exhibition Buildings of restored Williamsburg. The collection is acknowledged to be one of the finest in the country. Unfortunately, it contains not one stick of furniture that can be positively identified as coming from the hand of a Williamsburg cabinetmaker.
We do have, however, many bits and pieces of documentary evidence about various Williamsburg cabinetmakers of the colonial era and about the kind of work they did. A number of them, for example, advertised their services in the columns of the Virginia Gazette from time to time. Practitioners of other crafts often listed at great length the wares they made and sold; but the cabinetmakers usually announced only that they stood ready to make to order any kind of furniture. They were confidently versatile, it would seem; that they kept busy making and doing all sorts of things is corroborated by other scraps of written and printed information.
Joshua Kendall, when he set up shop in Williamsburg, offered to make “Venetian SUN BLINDS for windows.”
