Page:Southern Antiques - Burroughs - 1931.djvu/74



INCE the days of King Arthur, a table, and particularly a dining table, has been synonymous with royalty. Often to dine with a man is to make him your friend. The table, perhaps, more than any piece of furniture, serves to bring people into a closer relation and better understanding of each other, and of affairs as well. The interests of the American colonists were few, and they depended, to a great extent, on what they received in the way of pleasure, in their homes and from each other. It was around some of the tables that this pleasure found its best expression.

Washington's dinners, while he was President, were stately affairs, from which the ladies retired after the cloth had been removed, to await the gentlemen in the drawing-room above. Heavy dinners were the rule, with fish and fowl, pies, puddings, fruit and jellies a part of the general scheme. Jefferson gave dinner parties every day at Washington when Congress was being held, where from fourteen to eighteen



sat down as soon as it ended its daily session. The dinner bell at Monticello rang at five o'clock. Tea was served in the evening.

The picture further back of the Southern pioneer, in his rudely constructed house in a cleared space in the forest, seated in his great wainscot chair at the head of his "dining bord" as it was called, with his family around him on benches and stools, is pleasing to us. The first table used in America, we are told, was the large rectangular table, the type used before 1675, in the South, of carved oak, and made with bulbous legs, six or four as the number may have been, showing turnings akin to those of the old cupboard of 1620, and relating itself to the old refectory or trestle tables in use in the English monasteries of former days.

Another table, however, was to assume the first place of importance before the end of the seventeenth century. This was the gate-leg table, showing a drop-leaf—sometimes called the flap-leaf—to be developed in many forms, and to take many forms of turnings in the days following, as dictated by the inward promptings of the craftsman at work.

The gate-leg table has a long history of beauty and usefulness. Originating in the spiral twist of English design in the middle of the seventeenth century, it has shown much variety in style and form. As popular and decorative as this table is today, it is hard to realize that it reaches back into 50