It is hard to imagine what more of luxury, an annuity could furnish to a gentleman of the nineteenth century, if indeed Heaven had blessed him with a stomach capable of consuming such an “intolerable deal of sack.”
The next fifty years still further increased the elegance of living; and style as well as comfort began to be considered. In an inventory of household goods belonging to a Virginian in 1698, I find included, “a feather-bed, one sett Kitterminster curtains, and Vallens bedstead, one pair white linen sheets with two do. pillow biers, 2 Rusha-leather chaires, 5 Rush-bottom chaires, a burning glass, a flesk fork, and 6 Alchemy spoones” (alchemy being a mixed metal, originally supposed to be gold made by magic). In addition to these articles, the list includes a brass skimer and 2 pairs of pot-hooks, and, as its crowning glory, “1 old silver Dram-cup.” No doubt the possessor had sat with his boon companions on many a cold night, by the great chimney, plunging the hot poker into the fire.—
“And nursed the loggerhead, whose hissing dip,
Timed by nice instinct, creamed the mug of flip.”
The house of a planter in Virginia at the end of the seventeenth century, was substantial and comfortable. The inventory of such a planter mentions, as belonging to the homestead, a “parlor chamber, chamber over sd. chamber, chamber over the parlor, nursery, old nursery, room over the Ladyes chamber, Ladyes chamber, entry, store, home house quarter, home house, quarter over the creek, Smiths shopp, Barne, kitchen, Dary, chamber over the old Dary, flemings quarter, Robinsons quarter, Whitakers quarter, Black Wallnut Quarter.”
By this time, the house of the rich in the towns boasted a parlor, but its furnishing was of the simplest. A white floor sprinkled with clean white sand, large tables, and heavy high-backed chairs of solid, dark oak decorated a parlor enough for anybody, says the chronicler of Baltimore. William Fitzhugh directs Mistress Sarah Bland in London (1682) to procure him a suit of tapestry hangings for a room twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and nine feet high; “and half a dozen chairs suitable.”
The kitchen had long ago been separated from the dining-room, and, in the better houses, set off in a separate building, that its odours might not fill the other rooms when warm weather made open doors and windows necessary. The dining-room, with its broad buffet, its well-filled cellarette, its silver plate, and its quaint old English furniture, was generally the pleasantest room in the house. Opening out of the dining-room, between it and the parlor, ran the wide hall, with doors at either end, with carved stairway and panelled walls, often hung with family portraits.
Early in the eighteenth century, Spotswood came over as Governor of Virginia, and a new era of more elaborate living was introduced. His “palace” at Williamsburg, according to the contemporary report of the Reverend Hugh Jones—not to be taken, however, without a grain of salt—was “a magnificent structure, built at the publick expense, furnished and beautified with gates, fine gardens, offices, walks, a fine canal, orchards, etc,” and most impressive of all, in those days, when Sir Christopher Wren set the architectural fashions, “a cupola or lanthorn” illuminated on the King’s birthnight, or other festival occasion. At Germanna, a little settlement of Germans clustered round the Spotswood iron-works, the Governor built him a house so fine that Colonel Byrd speaks of it as The Enchanted Castle, and has left an amusing account of a visit he made him there. “I arrived,” he says, “about three o’clock, and found only Mrs. Spotswood at home. I was carried into a room elegantly set off with pier glasses, the largest of which came soon after to an odd misfortune. Amongst other favorite animals that cheered this lady’s solitude, a brace of tame deer ran familiarly about the house, and one of them came to stare at me as a stranger. But unluckily, spying his own figure in the glass, he made a spring over the tea-table that stood under it and shattered the glass to pieces, and, falling back upon the tea-table, made a terrible fracas.”
What a change is here, from the hewn timbers and bare walls and wooden trenchers of the pioneer, to enchanted castles and mirrors, and china and tea-tables!
This Colonel Byrd, who writes so genially of his visit to Germanna, was a typical cavalier—not godly, but manly—with a keen enjoyment of a jest, as the pucker at the corners of the lips in his portrait clearly shows, with a hearty good-will toward his neighbor and especially his neighbor’s wife, with a fine, healthy appetite, and a zest for all good things to eat and drink. In his boundary-line trip to Carolina and his journey to the mines, he smacks his lips over the fat things that fall in his way. Now it is a prime rasher of bacon, fricasseed in rum; now a capacious bowl of bombo. In one and the same paragraph, he tells how he commended his family to the care of the Almighty, fortified himself with a beefsteak, and kissed his landlady for good luck, before setting out on his travels.
Roughing it in camp, he dreams of the fine breakfast he will make on a fat doe, and a two-year-old bear, killed over night. At a stopping-place he records, “Our landlady cherished us with roast-beef and chicken-pie.” Having eaten these with a relish, he pours down a basin of chocolate, wishes peace to that house, and takes up his line of march for home. There is something refreshing to our jaded generation in the hearty enjoyment that our ancestors took in their food.