Page:Southern Antiques - Burroughs - 1931.djvu/28

4  making of furniture, which speaks for itself. It is recalled that at New Bern, John Hawks, from the Isle of Wight, and James Coor, whose work has been compared favorably with that of McIntyre, the master carver of Salem, did some of the carving and influenced, of course, the makers of furniture there, where unusual pieces are found today.

Contributing largely to the settlement of Virginia and North Carolina, and reaching into South Carolina, was an inland migration composed largely of Germans and Scotch-Irish, who took up their abode from time to time, as fancy moved them, in various settlements. Down through the Shenandoah Valley they came, on through the country of Winchester, Harrisonburg, Lexington, and southward toward Charlotte, even into South Carolina, carving out a destiny of their own, creating at times a unique civilization and leaving numberless witnesses behind in customs and traditions, old houses and furniture with marks of their own making upon them, as testified to in inventories and records. Much of this furniture, often pieces of worth, was made by the many cabinetmakers who made their way in and out of the various settlements in search of trade, as the small towns arose along the old post road.

A group of Germans, in America seeking opportunity for freedom in the exercise of their religion, followers of John Hus, established in 1753 a Moravian colony at Salem (now Winston-Salem), in North Carolina, where they constituted themselves on arrival into a community, made laws unto themselves, and put their imprint on much that remains to us today, and particularly on the types of furniture which have been found.

Georgia was the last to be established of the English colonies, the first settlement made at Savannah, in 1733, under James Oglethorpe. The early colonists were Germans, Scotch, Swiss, Portuguese, and English, but the majority after 1752 came from the Virginia Cavaliers. Lord Oglethorpe came over with the idea in his mind in setting up a buffer State by way of protection of Carolina from the French and the Spanish, to the south and west, and in making the colony a retreat for those suffering religious oppression in England, and for others desiring to free themselves of debt, with various schemes for them proposed. Silk raising was to be cultivated as a means of livelihood, but all this gave way in time, and Georgia finally yielded largely to the same influences surrounding the other colonies. More closely tied up with the English, however, the majority of the furniture of worth found there has proved to have been imported, not only from the home country but from New England as well.