Between 1652 and 1674, England and the Netherlands fought three successive wars, largely over restrictions against Dutch trade in the colonies. In 1664, England took control of the Dutch colonies in New York, New Jersey, and Delaware. As trade restrictions in the Chesapeake increased, a pro-Dutch political faction consisting of Governor Berkeley and members of the Yeardley, Littleton, Thoroughgood, and Custis families intervened. Not only did trade continue, but a small number of Dutch families migrated to the Chesapeake from former Dutch colonies, perhaps seeking congenial ground among old friends and trading partners. Among these immigrants was Augustine Herrman, a merchant and surveyer who had been involved in the tobacco trade between New Netherland and the Chesapeake since the 1650s. Herrman moved to Cecil County, Maryland, in 1660 and later published one of the most important maps of Maryland and Virginia (fig. 2). The Dutch population in the Chesapeake remained small, however, and assimilated quickly into the English-speaking community.6

Numerous artifacts associated with the Dutch trade have been excavated at seventeenth-century archaeological sites throughout the Chesapeake region. Dutch pottery and other ceramics—German stoneware and Chinese export porcelain—bartered for tobacco are relatively commonplace. At Kicotan, over half of the tobacco pipes excavated were made in Holland. Similarly, large quantities of Dutch tin-glazed earthenware (including fireplace tiles), lead-glazed earthenware, and bricks (which arrived as ballast) were recovered at Jamestown. Excavations at Flowerdew Hundred Plantation have produced one of the most emblematic symbols of the Dutch presence—a cast brass medallion depicting Maurice, Prince of Orange, Count of Nassau, dated 1615 (fig. 3). The medal commemorates Maurice’s induction into the English Order of the Garter in 1612, in honor of his service in the war against Spain. One of Maurice’s soldiers in the Dutch war for independence was Sir George Yeardley, the founder of Flowerdew Hundred Plantation in 1619. After excavating the home site of Dutch merchant Simon Overzee at St. Mary’s City, Maryland, archaeologist Henry Miller noted that “the evidence strongly implies that the Dutch, rather than the London merchants, dominated the tobacco trade during the first decades of settlement in Maryland.” Miller’s findings were amplified by archaeologist Al Luckenbach, whose recovery of Dutch trade materials at Providence in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, revealed “an unsuspected connection of such strength that a reevaluation of this historic period is required.”7

The inventory of Captain William Moseley (d. 1671) reveals a great deal about the impact of Dutch trade on the material culture of the early Chesapeake. Moseley lived in a large (by seventeenth-century Chesapeake standards), two-and-a-half-story house with an entry, a hall, and a master bedchamber on the first floor, three additional chambers on the second floor, and a study and storeroom in the garret (see Appendix A). Furnishing “Mr. Moseley’s Study in the garrett” were a little table, a small case of drawers, and “a parcell of Books some french dutch Latten & English.” In the “hall chamber” on the second floor were eight chairs, a close stool, a small table, a looking glass, “a little frame to putt a bason on,” and “one greate dutch trunck & what linnen is in it” valued at 3,470 pounds of tobacco. Moseley’s best furnishings were reserved for the “hall” on the first floor. The hall was generally the most elaborate room in seventeenth-century households, and it served a variety of social functions. Moseley’s hall furniture included a bed, a couch and two cushions, six chairs, five stools, a “side Borde & Cloath,” a table and carpet, six pictures, a looking glass, and “a greate dutch Cash,” or kast, valued at 500 pounds of tobacco. This value was more than twice that of any other case piece in his house. Moseley’s inventory also lists the contents of the kast, which were valued at 2,300 pounds of tobacco: “his woolen waring apparrell . . . 1300, a parcell of Linnen . . . 500, one old Cloaths Suite . . . 300, a small parcell of Buttons & thread a small Remnant of Sewing a Capp & a paire of topps . . . 200.” Used for the storage of linens and other expensive household textiles, kasten were the most important furniture forms in seventeenth-century Dutch homes. The use of Moseley’s kast differed significantly from the standard Dutch pattern, since it housed his personal clothing as well as linen and household textiles.8

Similar patterns of usage are revealed in a court case involving Simon Overzee. According to depositions taken in 1658, Overzee’s plantation near St. Mary’s City consisted of a kitchen, a dairy, a quarter for his indentured servants, and his main residence. Overzee’s house contained a hall and a master bedchamber, with additional sleeping space for guests in the loft. In the Overzees’s bedchamber was a closet for the storage of “meate & other necessaries of household” and a “Greate Dutch Trunk” for Mrs. Overzee’s wardrobe. Her dresses and larger garments were kept in the top compartment, and her bodices, aprons, neck pieces, and other small items were kept in “the Under Drawers.”9

Seventeenth-century Chesapeake inventories are replete with references to a variety of furniture forms specifically identified as “Dutch” (see Appendix B). The majority of these references are from areas where the Dutch tobacco trade flourished, such as Norfolk County, Virginia, and the Eastern Shores of Virginia and Maryland. In 1657, Edward Dowglas of Northampton County on Virginia’s Eastern Shore bequeathed to his daughter “one Dutch cupboard,” and in 1673, John Fawsett of neighboring Accomack County left his son a “greate Dutch chest.” Similarly, the 1676 inventory of John Carr of Cecil County, Maryland, lists “6 turn’d dutch chairs” valued at 360 pounds of tobacco. Unfortunately, most of these inventories fail to specify whether the objects were imported from Holland or made by local tradesmen in a style perceived as being “Dutch.” The August 18, 1696, inventory of Thomas Teackle of Accomack County, Virginia, appears to be an exception. Although it includes ambiguous references to a “Round Dutch Table” and “an old Dutch cupboard,” his inventory also lists “a pokomoke wheele of the Dutch fashion.” The term “pokomoke,” which refers to the creek (Pocomoke) dividing Virginia’s and Maryland’s Eastern Shores, suggests that Teackle’s spinning wheel was made by a local tradesman in what his appraisers considered “the Dutch fashion.” Evidently, some early Chesapeake joiners were capable of replicating Dutch forms.10

Homer Eaton Keyes was one of the first American furniture historians to speculate on the Continental aspects of seventeenth-century Chesapeake furniture. In an article on American joined chairs, Keyes illustrated a rare example “discovered by Mr. Goodwin in Virginia” (fig. 4). The chair’s fielded, molded back panel and sawn legs differed from the New England examples he illustrated, prompting him to write: “It is perhaps significant that these features occur in a chair . . . from a part of the country . . . [with] settlers from the Continent.” Keyes reasserted the argument for Continental influences in seventeenth-century Chesapeake furniture when he published a photograph of an oak court cupboard found “amid squalid surroundings” in Virginia (fig. 5). Keyes wrote:

Despite previous misconceptions, the Chesapeake’s artisan community was never uniformly English (see Appendix C). As early as 1608, the Virginia Company of London sent “eight Dutchmen and Poles” to work as glass blowers at Jamestown, and recent archaeological excavations have uncovered numerous examples of their work. Four of the “Dutchmen” in this group were later dispatched to work as carpenters for the purpose of building a “castle” for the local Indian chief, Powhatan. In 1621, the Virginia Company instructed Governor Francis Wyatt to “take care of the Dutch sent to build saw mills” and to ship lumber down the James River for export to Europe. Six years later, the Council and General Court of James City County, Virginia, noted that “Derrick the Dutch Carpenter” had agreed to build a boat for a local Englishwoman. After the English conquest of New York, New Jersey, and Delaware, a small number of Dutch families moved to the southern colonies, particularly Maryland. Many of these emigrés were carpenters, such as Matthias Peterson, Peter Mills, and Thomas Turner, whose naturalization records specify their Dutch origins. Turner reported that his birthplace was “Middleborough, Province of Zealand” when he applied for naturalization in Anne Arundel County in 1671. Also among the carpenters who emigrated from New Netherland to Maryland were Remy Lefer, Nicholas Fontaine, and Joseph Deserne, whose names appear more French than Dutch. From the outset, New Netherland was an ethnic polyglot of Dutch, Swedes, Finns, Germans, Walloons, and French Huguenots. The 1681 inventory of Dutch carpenter Henricke Cloystockfish lists tools appropriate for his trade, including nine old chisels, ten caulking irons, seven old planes, three old hammers, one old axe, three old adzes, two old saws, “an old Chest with some old Tooles,” and “a parcell of old Dutch Bookes.”12

Less than two dozen pieces of seventeenth-century Chesapeake furniture are known, but nearly a quarter have stylistic and structural features more closely associated with the Dutch-influenced furniture of New York than with the predominantly British-influenced products of New England. The clothes cupboard illustrated in figure 6 provides the strongest evidence of Dutch influence on early Chesapeake joinery. Although its walnut primary wood, fielded panels, and dovetailed construction caused scholars to date the cupboard between 1690 and 1710, Dutch-trained joiners in the Chesapeake produced “close Cupboard” forms by the 1660s. Documentary and physical evidence strongly suggest that this piece was made in Virginia during the third quarter of the seventeenth century.13

Although the seventeenth century is generally considered the age of oak furniture, Virginia walnut was shipped to England for “waynscot, tables, cubbordes, chairs and stooles” during the 1630s. The joiner who made the clothes cupboard used walnut for the front, canted corners, sides, moldings, and spindles, and yellow pine for the top, bottom, and back. The top and bottom boards are dovetailed to the sides, and the backboards are nailed to the top and bottom and pinned to the sides (fig. 7). Joiners in the Netherlands began using dovetail construction during the early sixteenth century.

The design of the clothes cupboard is unique. Although other colonial case pieces such as Germanic schranken and French armoires were used for storing clothes and household textiles, the form most closely associated with the clothes cupboard is the kast from Dutch-settled areas of New York and New Jersey (see fig. 8). By extension, the Virginia cupboard may be interpreted as a vernacular version of the magnificent Amsterdam kast depicted in Pieter de Hooch’s, Portrait of a Family Making Music (fig. 9). At first, this comparison may seem absurd; however, both pieces employ similar frame-and-panel construction (figs. 6, 9); both rest on separate turned feet (fig. 10); both have raised panel doors (fig. 11); and both have canted corners. The kast in de Hooch’s painting has carved baroque pilasters at the corners, whereas the Virginia-made example has long, mannerist spindles.

The clothes cupboard has at least four structural details associated with Dutch or Dutch colonial kasten—fielded panels, moldings run directly on the frame, mitered mortise-and-tenon joints, and dovetails. The panels on the cupboard have distinctive, concave fields that were cut with a large hollow plane, whereas those on New York kasten (see fig. 8) were typically formed with a panel plane. The fielded panels on the Virginia piece, nevertheless, almost certainly emanate from a Continental tradition, since fielded panels rarely occur on English work before the 1660s or on New England work from the seventeenth century. Such panels do occur, however, on New York kasten by the middle of the seventeenth century.14

The panel-and-frame construction of the clothes cupboard also relates more closely to Dutch joinery practices than to English ones. As on many New York and Dutch kasten, the doors of the cupboard have directly molded stiles and rails and mitered mortise-and-tenon joints (see figs. 6, 8, 11, 12). In English panel-and-frame construction, stile and rail moldings are typically applied, or they are planed on only one of the adjoining framing members (see fig. 12). As might be expected, no seventeenth-century New England furniture displays mitered mortise-and-tenon joinery. Other northern European details on the clothes cupboard are the diamond-shaped pins used to secure the mortise-and-tenon joints and backboards and the splines between the backboards (figs. 7, 13).

Most importantly, the clothes cupboard is the earliest piece of southern furniture with dovetail construction (fig. 13). In the colonies, dovetail joinery first appears on furniture associated with a small group of London-trained artisans who arrived in Boston and New Haven during the 1630s and early 1640s. In their work, and in most New England furniture of the seventeenth century, dovetailing is limited to the drawers of joined case pieces. Furniture historian Robert Trent has shown how dovetail technology could have arrived in London as early as the 1540s through the importation of chests from Danzig, Prussia, the Netherlands, Cologne, France, Italy, and the Iberian Peninsula. These chests, which featured board and dovetail construction, were favored by merchants and lesser gentry in England’s major ports. On the clothes cupboard, dovetails are used to attach the top and bottom boards to the sides. The early appearance of board and dovetail joinery on the Continent and its scarcity in Anglo-American furniture support the assertion that the clothes cupboard was made by a joiner trained in a northern European tradition.15

The clothes cupboard has a number of features that differentiate it from related Continental forms, such as the kast, schrank, and armoire. Its asymmetrical facade is the most obvious anomaly. The large compartment on the right is fitted on three sides with a pegboard for hanging clothes (fig. 14), and the smaller compartment on the left has two shelves for storing folded textiles (fig. 15). William Moseley’s “greate dutch Cash” may have been outfitted in a similar fashion, for it contained suits of clothes, “woolen waring apparrell,” and linens. No Continental precedent for this interior arrangement is known, although Moseley’s inventory suggests that it could be a regional adaptation.

Like the clothes cupboard, many early Chesapeake chairs (figs. 16, 17) have features that differentiate them from contemporary New England work and also link them to New York examples (fig. 18). Virginia chairs typically have turned arms that project beyond the front post rather than being tenoned into them, as on most English and New England examples. Overpassing arms are relatively common on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century chairs from Holland and France. The Chesapeake had a small Dutch and French population during the seventeenth century, but between 1700 and 1710 the French population increased dramatically owing to the emigration of Huguenot refugees to southeast Virginia. The armchair illustrated in figure 17 has another detail found on chairs from the Netherlands and France—a row of small turned finials tenoned into the crest rail. Three other Chesapeake chairs share this distinctive feature.16

One of the clearest manifestations of Continental influence in the Chesapeake is the stretcher table illustrated in figure 19. The table was purchased earlier this century by dealer Bessie L. Brockwell of Petersburg, Virginia, who discovered many of the surviving examples of seventeenth-century Chesapeake furniture. Made of black walnut and cedrela, a tropical hardwood probably imported from the West Indies, the table has a dovetailed frame and legs that are braced into the corners and pinned. Although the braces wedging the legs have no known parallel, some early New York City draw-bar tables have exposed dovetail frames (see fig. 20). Furniture historian Peter Kenny has attributed these tables to Dutch joiners and shown how their dovetail frames relate to the base construction of contemporary New York kasten. The Virginia table could have been made by a Dutch tradesman who immigrated to the Chesapeake region after the English conquest of New Amsterdam.17

The most compelling evidence that Dutch styles had a lasting influence on Chesapeake furniture centers around George Hack, a Dutch physician who died in Accomack County, Virginia, in 1665, and his indentured servant John Rickards. Hack’s widow, Anna, subsequently moved to Maryland with her two sons and was granted citizenship by a special act of the colonial legislature. Maryland records describe her as “born in Amsterdam, Holland,” and her sons, George and Peter, as “born at Accomacke, Virginia.” The Hack family was granted citizenship on the same day as Augustine Herrman and his family.18

Although Rickards is referred to as a “carpenter” in Accomack records of 1668, the tools that were at his disposal during his indenture were more varied than that trade required. Hack’s inventory listed “1 Crosscut Saw, 2 old whipsaws, 1 rest & a file, 1 old broad ax, 1 hatchet, 1 Pr. Iron compasses, 13 plaines small & great, 1 handsaw, 3 small saws, 2 percer Stocks & 5 percer bitts, 1 glue pott, 3 gowdges, 7 Chissells & 5 gimletts, 1 hamer, 1 pr. of pincers, 1 drawinge knife & 1 coopers adds, 1 howell, 5 turning tools, 2 broken holdfasts & 1 bench hook.” The thirteen planes, turning implements, and glue pot suggest that Rickards was both a turner and a furniture joiner.19

In 1668, Rickards signed an indenture with Anne Boote of Accomack County, in which he agreed to make fifty-four pieces of furniture.

Mrs. Boote undoubtedly intended to sell most of Rickards’s work; however, the “very handsome” court cupboard and clothes cupboard made “according to Mrs. Boote” were probably for her personal use. The latter phrase shows how seventeenth-century patrons interacted with tradesmen and influenced the design of their household furnishings. Court cupboards and “close cupboards” like the example illustrated in figure 6 were obviously popular forms in Virginia during the third quarter of the seventeenth century.20

Indentures and apprenticeships clearly contributed to the persistence of Dutch furniture-making traditions in the Chesapeake. In 1673, Rickards took William Phillpott as an apprentice for the unusually short term of three years and nine months. Rickards agreed to teach Phillpott the “vocation of [the] Carpenters Trade” and furnish him with “such Carpenters Tooles as the Said Phillpott Worketh with in the time of his Servitude” at the end of his indenture. Since William Phillpott was undoubtedly a young man in 1673, it is possible that the shop tradition that began with Rickards’s indenture to Hack extended into the early eighteenth century.21

Clearly no Continental Europeans were more involved in the commercial and political affairs of the Chesapeake region than the Dutch. During the first quarter of the seventeenth century, they sailed to the Chesapeake to barter for tobacco. Dutch traders established permanent settlements at strategic points along the region’s waterways, and Dutch artisans immigrated to the region. Although the Dutch were gradually assimilated by the larger English population, documentary and material evidence indicates that they had a profound impact on the material life of the seventeenth-century Chesapeake region.

Acknowledgments
For their assistance with this article, I thank Robert Trent, Luke Beckerdite, Peter Kenny, Martha Rowe, Ronald Hurst, Jay Gaynor, and especially Frank Horton.

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C