MESDA and the study of early southern decorative arts

Magazine Antiques, March, 2005 by Johanna Metzgar Brown

It has become almost a folk legend among decorative arts scholars: the story of Joseph Downs (1895-1954), then curator of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, announcing at the 1949 Williamsburg Antiques Forum that "little of artistic merit was made south of Baltimore." (1) The comment prompted an offended woman from Kentucky to ask whether Downs spoke from prejudice or ignorance.

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At the time, the unfortunate gaffe threw down the gauntlet, so to speak, inspiring collectors of southern decorative arts to prove Downs wrong. The first large public effort in this regard was the seminal 1952 Loan Exhibition of Southern Furniture 1640-1820, spearheaded by the editorial consultant to The Magazine ANTIQUES, Helen Comstock, and produced by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Among those who contributed to the exhibition was Frank L. Horton (1918-2004), a meticulous researcher and ardent collector with a mind like a computer and a penchant for organization that even the most sophisticated computer would have a hard time duplicating. Horton and his mother, Theodosia "Theo" Taliaferro (1891-1971), loaned to the exhibition the mid-seventeenth-century Virginia court cupboard shown in Plate IV, which many consider to be one of the earliest extant examples of Virginia furniture.

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Horton was determined that a museum dedicated to the study of southern decorative arts was an essential follow-up to the 1952 exhibition. His natural proclivity for recognizing significant information about them made him the perfect advocate for the study of southern decorative arts. Due in large part to his efforts, the field continues to flourish today. Horton's contribution was the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which celebrates its fortieth anniversary as the only institution in the country dedicated to the study of the pre-industrial decorative arts from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The core of the museum's holdings is the collection of the founders, Frank Horton and his mother, whose gradual donations culminated in the gift of 284 objects in 2000.

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The museum opened in January 1965 with fifteen period rooms and four galleries in a reconfigured Kroger grocery store building at the south end of Main Street in Old Salem, a restored Moravian town in Winston-Salem. The period room woodwork was salvaged from southern structures in danger of demolition or reproduced from examples in surviving southern houses. The woodwork from the Charleston Parlor (see cover), for example, was reproduced by John Bivins Jr. from the Humphrey Sommers house (c. 1769-1770) which still stands in Charleston. The furnishings in the room were all made in Charleston between 1750 and 1775. Horton had been instrumental in the restoration of Old Salem and the opening of the town as a museum composed of historic houses and shops. MESDA was created as a part of Old Salem and remains so today. The museum has grown to include twenty-four period rooms and seven galleries.

Shortly after Horton and his mother donated the funds in 1960 to purchase the building that would house MESDA, an editorial in the Winston-Salem Journal noted "the value of such a museum, both to the [Old Salem] restoration project and to the cultural life of the country, cannot be over emphasized." (2) Alice Winchester, the editor of The Magazine ANTIQUES, called the opening of MESDA, "the most significant event in this field since the 1952 exhibition." (3)

As Horton sought out southern antiques, first for the Old Salem buildings and later for MESDA, he carefully documented even the examples he did not purchase. By 1972 Horton and his staff at the museum determined that it was essential to formalize their efforts to record southern decorative arts, and with grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities they established the field research program whereby objects identified by Horton and field researchers as southern and made prior to 1820 were photographed and carefully described. Today there are nearly thirty thousand such records in the MESDA Research Center under the title Catalogue of Early Southern Decorative Arts, which is consulted by hundreds of scholars each year. Horton also initiated a complementary program to search historical documents such as newspapers and court records for information about craftsmen working in the South and the products of their shops. This electronic database called the Index of Early Southern Artists and Artisans now documents more than seventy-five thousand artisans working in 126 different trades prior to 1821.

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At the 1972 Williamsburg Antiques Forum, Horton gave a lecture in which he celebrated the many findings in the field of southern decorative arts between 1949 and 1972. He spoke of the field as ripe with possibilities for discovery and research. (4) Horton always considered the context of the objects recorded by the research program to be as important as the objects themselves. In this sense, he was a devotee of material cultural before the field of material culture blossomed into what it is today. More than one beneficiary of MESDA's abundant resources has argued that Horton's approach, and by extension MESDA's approach, changed the standard for decorative arts documentation and scholarship.