1. In 1764 George Washington ordered “Two Elbow—& Ten common sitting Chairs for an Entertaining Room” from a factor in Liverpool. The same year, London upholsterer Edward Polhill supplied Washington with “12 Chairs covered with Leather and brass nail’d, 2 Elbows to ditto, 6 Windsor Chairs painted Green.” Helen Maggs Fede, Washington Furniture at Mount Vernon (Mount Vernon, Va.: Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, 1966), p. 22. 2. Clear evidence of Irish furniture design also has been observed in the piedmont region of North Carolina. See Michael H. Lewis, “American Vernacular Furniture and the North Carolina Backcountry,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 20, no. 2 (November 1994): 1–38. 3. William H. Seiner, “Economic Development in Revolutionary Virginia: Fredericksburg, 1750–1810” (Ph.d. diss., College of William and Mary, 1982), p. 20. 4. James B. Slaughter, Settlers, Southerners, Americans: The History of Essex County, Virginia, 1608–1984 (Tappahannock, Va.: Essex County Board of Supervisors, 1985), pp. 36–40. Hunter Dickinson Farish, ed., Journal & Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774 (Williamsburg, Va.: Colonial Williamsburg, 1957), p. 154. Information about Nesmith was extracted from the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts’s (hereinafter cited as MESDA) computerized Index of Early Southern Artists and Artisans. The practice of farming during the growing season and following another trade during cold weather was widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America. A southern example of this pattern was cabinetmaker and carpenter Joseph Freeman (1772–1842) of Gates County, North Carolina. (John Bivins, Jr., The Furniture of Coastal North Carolina, 1700–1820 [Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press for MESDA, 1988], pp. 374–76, 468–69). 5. American furniture historians use the term trifid to describe feet like those on the high chest base shown in figure 16. For the purposes of this essay, I will use trifid in the Irish sense. For an example of a Philadelphia foot of this form, see Joseph Downs, American Furniture, Queen Anne and Chippendale Periods (New York, N.Y.: MacMillan Co., 1952), no. 73. 6. The corner chair is recorded in MESDA research file S-5643, where conflicting notes indicate that the chair was owned in Fredericksburg or King and Queen County. However, the present owner, a descendent of the original owner, confirms that the chair came from Peach Grove near the town of Owenton in King and Queen County. 7. The Finch high chest of drawers is tentatively attributed to Williamsburg, Virginia, in Wallace Gusler, Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern Virginia, 1710–1790 (Richmond: Virginia Museum, 1979), pp. 21–23. The attribution was based on the reported York County, Virginia, history of a dressing table from the same shop, but new research suggests that the table was originally owned in the Rappahannock basin vicinity. See figure 17 and note 8 of the present essay. In addition to the Finch chest, a second, unrelated example is recorded in MESDA research file S-2169. Made of black walnut and yellow pine, the second chest is missing its upper case, lower case top board, lower case drawers and drawer supports, and one of its front legs. For examples of Irish high chests of drawers, see John T. Kirk, American Furniture and the British Tradition to 1830 (New York, N.Y.: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 195, figs. 560–61. 8. For sample references to the Wornom family in Northumberland County, see T. L. C. Genealogy, Virginia in 1740: A Reconstructed Census (Miami Beach, Fl.: T. L. C. Genealogy; 1992), p. 305; Netti Schreiner-Yantis and Florene Speakman Love, comps., The 1787 Census of Virginia, 3 vols. (Springfield, Va.: Genealogical Books in Print, n.d.), 2:1270, 1998; and Government Printing Office, Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States taken in the Year 1790, Virginia (Washington, D.C., 1908), pp. 38, 75, 188. Despite the survival of York County records as far back as the 1630s, the earliest reference to the Wornom family in that jurisdiction is a marriage record in 1825. W. B. Crindlin, “York County Marriages,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 25 (December 1917): 420. 9. The city of Richmond, located in central Virginia on the James River, should not be confused with Richmond County on the Rappahannock River. The slipper foot also appears in the piedmont region of North Carolina, where other Irish-influenced furniture designs have been recorded. See Lewis, “American Furniture and the North Carolina Backcountry,” pp. 29–33. For an example of a Philadelphia slipper foot, see Downs, American Furniture, no. 112. For a Newport slipper-foot high chest of drawers dated 1748, see Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1984), p. 34, fig. I–38. 10. The thin pads beneath the feet on the Beverley table are twentieth-century additions. 11. For the histories of the Bates and Sabine Hall tables, see MESDA research files S-3894 and S-4045. The rear face of each foot on the Sabine Hall table exhibits a short, vertical flute executed with a gouge. Pairs of wider but equally short flutes appear on the backs of the paneled feet on the Finch family high chest. The objects do not appear to be otherwise connected, but the fluting may represent a local practice employed in several shops. A now-lost eastern Virginia dressing table made of black walnut and yellow pine had turned pad feet with single, broad flutes on the back. MESDA research file S-5300. 12. The Chinn chair was illustrated in Helen Comstock, “Furniture of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky,” Antiques 61, no. 1 (January 1952): 66, fig. 48. The inverted baluster-form splat, rare in Virginia, is similar to those on a set of black walnut chairs originally owned by the Tayloe family at Mount Airy plantation, directly across the river from Tappahannock. MESDA research files S-5422, 6057, and 7080. Initial testing suggested that one of the Tayloe chairs was made of European walnut, but it is now believed that all of these chairs are of American black walnut. 13. For the history of the Jeffreys chest with drawers on cabriole stand, see MESDA research file S-4567. The two other chests are from a second unidentified shop. One is made of yellow pine, and the other of black walnut. See Comstock, “Furniture of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky,” p. 70, fig. 68; and Paul H. Burroughs, Southern Antiques (New York, N.Y.: Garrett & Massie, Inc., 1931), p. 151, pl. 4. 14. Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, 3d. ed. (London, 1762), pls. 9, 19, 25. 15. Thomas M. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, 1660–1783 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 20, 34–35, 39, 66, 69, 79–80, 171, 181–83. 16. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, pp. 122–24, 187. 17. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, pp. 128–39. 18. Truxes, Irish-American Trade, pp. 123, 141. 19. McCormick’s career is summarized in Ronald L. Hurst, “Cabinetmakers and Related Tradesmen in Norfolk, Virginia: 1770–1820” (master’s thesis, College of William and Mary, 1989), pp. 123–25.