IV
FURNITURE OF THE PIONEERS
AMERICA, in the first fifty years of her existence, was largely under control of the British influence in many ways, and the idea of house and furniture clung closely to early English tradition, when many often slept in one bed, none too comfortable, and wherever a fireplace happened to be. Chairs were unusual, the use of them attended with such ceremony as the commoner seldom attained to. The wainscot chair, the early important British chair, with its rectangular joinings, upstanding posts and heavy stretchers, thought in fact to have descended from old church chairs, and used on occasions of state in England, has been copied both in the North and South.
The first Southern settlers, in many instances, could do no better for themselves by way of shelter than huts and cabins, and even caves, with the Cavalier-born, as well as the less fortunate, having to bide their time until something better could be produced. Following the cabins in Maryland, came the pine-board house, green-shingled and shuttered or paneled at the windows, and as housebuilding got under way in Maryland and Virginia, the barn-type house, with high pitched roofs, and chimneys built outside the walls, largely prevailed. The general type in Virginia clung to the idea of the central hall with two large rooms on either side.
The use of tents has been implied for the early settlers of the Clarendon colony to the South, but some of the South Carolina colonists lived in mud and clay houses of a better type, one of which is said to have stood to this day near Kingstree, in Williamsburg County. An example of the houses built of native cement, composed of lime and oyster shell, tabby, as it is called, is that on Fripp's Island, near Beaufort. Early houses, too, were built sometimes of marl, in South Carolina.
The early artisans and laborers found their comfort in nothing short of peglegged stools, plank tables rudely set up, and benches with pillows of pine, when they could get them for furniture; but it was not to continue so with the wealthy men of the colonies, with dignity in their living early presenting itself. Finding themselves possessed of numberless slaves and far-reaching lands, as the century progressed, they spent freely, and were, by the middle of the seventeenth century, ready to fall into line with the general movement abroad for more comfort. Their inventories and wills reveal a constant reaching out after luxuries; and some, before the century was over, were actually living in affluence and splendor.
Adam Thoroughgood, member of the King's Council, took himself a wife in 1626, and very soon built himself a house of straw-bound brick interlaid with something better, the oldest house now standing in Virginia today; and in its kitchen-dining room, in the keeping room or parlor, with paneled chimney piece and deep windows, in the hall and above the stairs, may be
