Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Robert Leath, whose enthusiasm spurred this project forward and whose research contributed significantly to the outcome. Colleague Tara Gleason Chicirda made important contributions as well. I also thank Luke Beckerdite, Carol Borchert Cadou, Frank and Barbara Cross, Lisa Kathleen Graddy, Wallace Gusler, Valerie Hardy, Mack Headley, Hans Lorenz, Craig McDougal, Milly McGehee, Al and Bridget Ritter, Martha Rowe, Albert Skutans, Christopher Swan, Paul Voelkel, John Watson, and Robert and Priscilla Wellford for their kind assistance.
1. Wallace B. Gusler, Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern Virginia, 1710–1790 (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1979), pp. 25–57. A review of the furniture attributed by Gusler to Scott reveals that only two lots have Williamsburg connections: a clothespress and a suite of seating furniture. The clothespress (p. 44, fig. 36) is clearly from the same shop that made the other furniture in the former Scott group, and it has a history of ownership in the Galt family of Williamsburg. While the Galts did own a number of locally made pieces, recent examination of the family papers at the College of William and Mary has shown that they also purchased antiques from relatives in other parts of Virginia beginning in the early twentieth century. The suite of seating furniture (pp. 40–41, figs. 32–34) has a reliable history of use at the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg, but side-by-side examination confirms that there are significant differences between the proportions, frame layout, and stock sizes of the chairs in the Palace suite and all the others in the former Scott group. The author attributes the Palace suite to another, as yet unidentified, Williamsburg shop.
2. The year of Scott’s birth was deduced from his age at the time of death. Virginia Gazette, December 2, 1775. The Keith mortgage is detailed in Land Causes, 1746–1769, p. 42, York County Courthouse (hereafter cited as YCC), Yorktown, Virginia. The Parks mortgage appears in Wills and Inventories Book 20, pp. 323–26, YCC. The McKenzie loan appears in Land Causes, 1746–1769, pp. 95–106, YCC. The Ferguson mortgage purchase appears in Judgments and Orders Book 4, p. 449, YCC. Sale of the same mortgage is documented in Order Books, 1765–1768, p. 146, YCC. Records for the hustings court of the city of Williamsburg and those for James City County, which covered approximately half the residents of Williamsburg, were destroyed during the Civil War.
3. A Williamsburg newspaper noted that “Mr. Peter Scott’s old house in this city, which he had rented and lived in for fourty-three years, was burnt down last Sunday night by accident.” Virginia Gazette, January 26, 1776. The Custis family owned three contiguous rental properties on Duke of Gloucester Street. The middle house (lot 354) was occupied by Scott; those on either side were at various times rented by cabinetmakers John Ormeston, James Spiers, Richard Booker, and possibly others. Notes on the original Scott invoice reveal that the dressing tables, several other pieces of work, and a sum of cash, the whole worth £20, were conveyed to Daniel Parke Custis by Scott as payment for the rental of his shop.
4. The Custis inventories detail the property of the deceased in the counties of New Kent, King William, James City, York, Northampton, and Hanover. In several instances Washington’s copies of these estate documents are the only ones extant since the records for some of the above counties were destroyed during the Civil War. The Papers of George Washington, Colonial Series, edited by W.W. Abbot, 10 vols. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983–1995), 6: 220–31. The New Kent inventory reference to bureau dressing tables appears in ibid., 6: 223. Thomas Chippendale used the various names for this furniture form interchangeably. In his influential design manual he illustrated the form and termed it a “Dressing Table” (Thomas Chippendale, The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director [London, 1754], pl. 10). In his 1774 accounts with Ninian Home, Chippendale used the term “Buroe Table” (Christopher Gilbert, The Life and Works of Thomas Chippendale, 2 vols. [London: Christie’s, 1978], 1: 274, 2: 228).
?5. The list of transported possessions appears in Abbot, The Papers of George Washington, 6: 234. The George Washington probate reference is in Inventory of the Contents of Mount Vernon, 1810, edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1909), p. 10. Chapman’s work and notes are described in William M. S. Rasmussen and Robert S. Tilton, George Washington: The Man behind the Myths (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), pp. 258–59.
6. Largely invisible to the naked eye, the signature was revealed through infrared photography at Colonial Williamsburg in 2004.
7. The Patrick Henry association was reported and the bureau table illustrated in Paul H. Burroughs, Southern Antiques (Richmond, Va.: Garrett and Massie, 1931), p. 107 and p. 113, pl. 3. According to a family tradition, the Harwood-Skinner bureau table descended from Martha Anne Blount and Joshua Skinner (married 1780) of Chowan County, North Carolina, to Joseph Blount Skinner (1781–1851) to Tristram Skinner (1820–1862) of Edenton, North Carolina, and thence in the family to the present (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts [hereafter cited as MESDA] research file S-2370, Winston-Salem, North Carolina). However, genealogical research at Colonial Williamsburg revealed that Tristram Skinner attended the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg during the late 1830s and married Eliza Fisk Harwood (1827–1888) of Williamsburg in 1849. The Skinners were also closely related to the Page family of Gloucester County, Virginia, where much Scott furniture was owned. The fourth bureau dressing table is known only through its illustration in Edgar G. Miller Jr., The Standard Book of American Antique Furniture (New York: Greystone Press, 1950), p. 767, fig. 1463.
8. The Henry bureau table is described as an English import in Burroughs, Southern Antiques, p. 107. Early-eighteenth-century English case construction details are catalogued in Adam Bowet, “A New Chronology for English Walnut-Veneered Furniture, 1670–1740,” Antiques 161, no. 6 (June 2002): 110–12.
9. Scott’s notice appears in Virginia Gazette, September 17, 1755. The sale of Scott’s estate is advertised in Virginia Gazette, January 5, 1776, supplement. The Jefferson references appear in Gusler, Furniture of Williamsburg and Eastern Virginia, p. 27. English structural details are discussed in Bowet, “A New Chronology for English Walnut-Veneered Furniture,” p. 111.
10. The Baytop desk-and-bookcase is recorded in MESDA research file s-5316.
11. The Todd desk-and-bookcase is recorded in MESDA research file s-5373.
12. The Coke-Garrett desk is recorded in MESDA research file s-7264.
13. The Vaughan desk-and-bookcase is recorded in MESDA research file s-2361. The Market Square Tavern desk-and-bookcase is recorded in MESDA research file s-2546. The Burke desk and cabinet was first examined and recorded by the author in 1991. It was then the property of Jerry Brill.
14. Scott’s notice appears in Virginia Gazette, September 17, 1755. For the Custis screen table, see the original invoice illustrated in fig. 5. For the Jefferson pieces, see Thomas Jefferson Papers, Miscellaneous Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Robert Carter did not pay for the objects mentioned until 1785, a decade after Scott’s death. Robert Carter Day Book, vol. 14, 1776–1778, p. 146, and Robert Carter to Henry Tazewell, April 1785, Robert Carter Letter Book, vol. 6, 1784–1785, pp. 134–35, Duke University Library.
15. Percy Macquoid and Ralph Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture: From the Middle Ages to the Late Georgian Period (London, 1924–1927; 2nd ed. revised and enlarged by Ralph Edwards, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Barra Books, 1983), p. 206.
16. The table is recorded in MESDA research file S-13,490.
17. The Custis inventory reference to the table is in Abbot, The Papers of George Washington, 6: 222. The reference to the table among goods taken to Mount Vernon is in ibid., 6: 234. The Washington inventory reference appears in Ford, Mount Vernon, p. 9. In her will, Martha Washington gave “to my grand daughter Eleanor Parke Lewis” “the marble table in the garrett.” Last Will and Testament, Martha Washington, September 2, 1800, and June 21, 1802, Fairfax County Courthouse, Fairfax, Virginia.
18. Corotoman, the largest and grandest house in early-eighteenth-century Virginia, was destroyed by fire in 1729. Family tradition holds that the dining table in fig. 30 was among the goods rescued from the fire. Carter’s son, Landon Carter (1710–1778), was the next owner of the table. It remains with his descendants today.
19. According to notes in the object file at the Botetourt County Historical Society, the spinet was brought to the area that would later become Botetourt County circa 1740 by John Crawford. Botetourt County was formed from Augusta County in 1770. Augusta County court records reveal that the county was home to a large number of Crawfords in the eighteenth century, including several John Crawfords. The Crawford family also lived in York County, Virginia, immediately adjacent to Williamsburg, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
20. For a discussion of the separation between turners and cabinetmakers, see Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), pp. 44–46. For an example of a Coxed and Woster label, see Ambrose Heal, The London Furniture Makers from the Restoration to the Victorian Era, 1660–1840 (London: B. T. Batsford, 1953), p. 31. For information on Old and Ody, see Heal, The London Furniture Makers, p. 126. On December 9, 1748, widow Elizabeth Bassett paid £5 “To Mr. Scott for a Desk for B Bassett,” her son, then a student at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg. On June 12, 1752, she paid £14.13 “To Mr. Spiers for Chairs.” These purchases are recorded in the William Bassett Papers, Account Books, Virginia Historical Society Richmond.
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