Page:Southern Antiques - Burroughs - 1931.djvu/40

16  seen something of the style of living to which even the lone planters of the day might attain.

Toddsbury, in Gloucester County, Virginia, built in 1658, a veritable gem in architectural design and execution as seen in these distant days, has remained the wonder of succeeding generations. Its maple-paneled dining room with fluted pilasters, its slow, ascending stairway, the delicacy of its balustrade and beauty of its spindles, posts and dado, help to make the wonder grow. Bacon's Castle, in Surry County, built in 1649; the Galt house in Williamsburg, where the Grand Assembly met in 1677, and others in Virginia, might be mentioned. The Wormeley house stands out, dignified, ornate, and richly furnished, where Ralph Wormeley, in the manner of a lord, lived up to the dignities of a member of the King's Council, overlooking the broad lowlands of the river.

Cross Manor, Calvert's Rest, Brushwood, on the South Wicomico, hark back to the stately days of early Maryland. The Old Brick House on the Edisto Island, in South Carolina, with its walls two feet thick, its cypress paneling and painting in oil by master hands, tells a story somewhat different from that of the oldest house at Beaufort, so arranged that muskets could be exploded from both sides, with a place provided below where ammunition might be kept at hand.

Throughout, joiners and carpenters were at work. The more prosperous depended on importation for the best of their furniture. The home craftsmen copied for the less wealthy citizens. The piece of most service was the chest, containing, as a rule, what store of worldly goods the colonist had been allowed to bring across. "A bord of which ship I did put My Self Wth Chest and Cloathes," wrote the Reverend John Lawrence, in those early days, striking a popular note; for passage was seldom asked for without it. The finer, or "joyned" chests, came from England. The simpler chests in the South were made in cedar, spruce, oak, pine, walnut, and cypress, by which swamp pine must have been meant, is often mentioned. Carving came into the South with the later chests after the middle of the seventeenth century. Chests marked the beginning everywhere of a line of noble furniture.

Cupboards partake, throughout, of the seventeenth century forms, and were the most decorated pieces of their day, due to the various treatments they received in their design. Both the court cupboard and the press cupboard were built on the same general idea, of one carcass placed upon another. The top section of the press cupboard was similar to the lower, and closed at the bottom. That of the court cupboard was usually open, with the shelf. Cupboards of much charm of later date remain of the old South.

The earliest found in the South is the court cupboard, and the word is generally accepted as referring to the carved oak cupboard of the early seventeenth century. The earliest example presented is one which, according to design, must have been made between 1615 and 1620, and it is known to have come from Virginia. The oak Virginia-made cupboard, lined with Southern pine, which is illustrated, stamped with its early style, makes safe the