Page:Southern Antiques - Burroughs - 1931.djvu/49

Rh  carved and plain, mahogany bedsteads, neat double and half chests of drawers; French Chairs, brass nailed ditto," adding that "Three month's credit will be given for all sums above twenty pounds."

Everywhere, elegance and ease and the quest for the beautiful was in order, with Charles Town, the year 1765, graced by the Miles Brewton House, at High Street, in all its basemented splendor and French curving entrance and balustrade, its wide, flagged hall having a broad mahogany stairway, its cornices and chimney pieces and its doorway with exquisitely carved frame and forelight. Here may be seen the work of Waite, the English architect and carver from London who, according to his own statement, had had experience "both in theory and practice in noblemen's and gentlemen's seats," and who planned and "carved all the said work in the four principal rooms, and also calculated, adjusted, and draw'd at large for to work by the Ionick entablature, and carved the same in front and round the eaves." This house is known today as the Pringle House. The Horry House came 1n 1767.

There was elegance among the planters, and leisure, if desired, on from the middle of the century, with building activity continued, as the struggles with the French and Indians ended. Carter's Grove, in Virginia, built in 1751, showed doorways flanked with pilasters, hand-tooled work in the drawing room, fronting the river, a Roman Doric cornice above its chimney piece, and easy-falling stairway with twisted newels and fine ramp, an archway eighteen feet wide, flanked by Ionic pilasters breaking the wall paneled in black walnut and pine. Kenmore, in Fredericksburg on the Rappahannock, where Betty Washington Lewis made her home, with her mother hard by, was a house of stately proportion; but at Gunston Hall, trim and all neat, above the Potomac, 1755, to which spot he had brought his fifteen-year-old Maryland bride, George Mason sat and pondered on the rights of man. Trouble was brewing. So, with the war upon him, Thomas Jefferson, at Monticello, in the early '70's was soon to halt his task. He was then engaged with the classical revival of architecture and preparing to strike the note of white-columned beauty in the mansion he was building there, to be taken up by many Southern mansions elsewhere, and carried to its highest peak of excellence in the State capitol and University.

Washington, at Mount Vernon, in 1774, as the grievance increased, sent no more to England, but satisfied himself with luxuries bought much nearer home when the Fairfax furniture was sold at Belvoir, taking in a mahogany shaving set, a settee bed and furniture, the mahogany chest and drawers that had stood in Mrs. Fairfax's chamber, one mahogany sideboard, twelve chairs, one mahogany desk, and one mahogany close stool.