MESDA and the study of early southern decorative arts

Magazine Antiques, March, 2005 by Johanna Metzgar Brown

A desire to share the results of the research and collecting programs at MESDA has resulted in a variety of educational programs and publications through the years. In his introduction to the first issue of the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts in 1975, Horton describes the museum's field research and document-reading programs and ends by saying, "It is, as you see, time to tell you something of our findings, thus the Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts. We hope it will grow." (5) Other publications include the Frank L. Horton Series of Decorative Arts Monographs, and there are programs such as the graduate level Summer Institute on Early Southern History and Decorative Arts offered in conjunction with the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. These have encouraged the study and publication of information about southern material culture and regional history and greatly increased the consciousness of collectors, scholars, and laymen about their importance.

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Bradford L. Rauschenberg served the museum in a variety of capacities over the years and traveled extensively with Horton, documenting objects in the field research program. He recalls many times when objects he and Horton had examined on porches, in barns, and in attics appeared years later cleaned up and displayed in the finest rooms of the house due largely to MESDA's recognition of the objects as important representatives of southern material culture. As one supporter of the museum recently commented, "MESDA has proven to the nation that the South [and the products of southern artisans] are as important, as classical, as proficient and adept, [and] as desirable as those of any other area of America." (6)

When the museum opened in 1965, the court cupboard (Pl. IV) that Horton and his mother had loaned to the 1952 exhibition was once again placed in a position of prominence, this time in the great hall reproduced from Criss Cross Hall (see Pl. X), a house built about 1690 in New Kent County, Virginia. The cupboard has remained there ever since and has become the unofficial symbol of MESDA and its mission to collect, preserve, and study the decorative arts of the early South.

In many ways, the cupboard also represents Horton's perseverance as a collector and researcher. It descended from a Thomas Vines of York County, Virginia, whose 1737 estate inventory listed an "old cupboard." (7) When it was discovered by the Virginia antiques dealer J. L. Brockwell in the 1920s, it was being used to store smoked hams and tools on the back porch of a Vines family descendant's house, certainly a humble function for an object, which, when new would have occupied a place of prominence in the house and have been used to display the family's most valued ceramics, pewter, and silver.

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Brockwell exhibited the cupboard at the New York Antiques Exposition in 1929 and later in the shop he ran with his wife, Bessie. When Horton saw the cupboard in the Brockwells' shop several years later, he was determined to have it. Although it took years to acquire, Horton's perseverance paid off, and by 1947 he had finally persuaded a now divorced Bessie Brockwell to sell him the cupboard.