V
STYLE DEVELOPMENT IN FURNITURE
AT THE beginning of the eighteenth century, furniture makers abandoned straight lines and turned to curves, especially in chairs. The cabriole leg was employed. After the reign of Elizabeth, turning machinery was improved, and Queen Anne herself is credited with having encouraged more decorative and graceful designs. With the Dutch influence laying the basis of the development ahead, England and France, in the first part of this half of this century, were approaching the golden period of furniture.
The first half of the century found the colonists in their living well past comfort, and many on the way to affluence and ease, the smaller men receiving their meed of good fortune as well. Governor Gooch's ruling for the inspection of tobacco in Virginia, rolled up the revenues of the plantation owners, and set more of them to building better houses and buying or making better furniture. The work of the journeymen and private craftsmen, particularly in the plantations, during these days, must not be forgotten, and such homes as these offered rich opportunity for the work there, while county records reveal, throughout the century, the journeymen at work.
Many of the better houses now were definitely elegant in structure and appointment. Early in the century, Rosewell, in Tidewater, Virginia, rose upon Carter's Creek, ponderous in style, superb in finish, with a miraculously carved stairway down which eight might walk abreast. Stratford, the home of the Lee family, in a pretentious manner, took its place above the Potomac, in 1729, in the Virginia Northern Neck. Sabine Hall, on the Rappahannock, followed the next year, marked by its elaborate joinery, cornices, pilasters and unusual stairway with twisted spindles, the painted paneling in the dining room, its library, and music room. Westover was built for the Byrds in the early thirties, in its Georgian loveliness of today, where its fading brick and fine doorway and stately entrance, formal garden, and gentle bend of the lawn to the river beneath the tulip poplars, as much as anywhere else recalls those days of stately living.
Settlement, meanwhile, had proceeded apace in the newer colonies to the south, not only on the Chowan, but at Cape Fear, where old Wilmington was showing its face; and inward, on the Cooper and Ashley, around Charles Town, the mother of the southernmost colony; on the neck of land beyond between the rivers, where the homes of the Mathews, Greens, Grays, Grimballs, and Izards might be seen with those of Land Grave Bellinger and Sir John Yeamans. Land grants along the west and east branches of the Cooper had been taken up, and homes were making on Goose Creek, and the Santees, where many Huguenots dwelt; at Georgetown, in 1734; Saint John's; Saint Mark's, including the northwest part of the State, in 1757; on the Ashley, Dorchester, and on towards Beaufort and Columbia, as time progressed.
