FURNITURE PATRONAGE in ANTEBELLUM NATCHEZ - Natchez, Misssissippi

Magazine Antiques, May, 2000 by Jason T. Busch

Will you please inform Meeks that I have sent back to him the etagere as it is entirely too small. I ordered him to make me one with three apartments & on the one sent has just two[ldots]So you see the whole thing was ordered to be made much longer and deeper. There is no use of ordering one by letter, for if he could not make one from a verbal order, he certainly cannot make one from a letter[ldots]When we come on next summer I will order one early so that I may see it before we leave for home.

And two months later he wrote:

Do the best you can with that rascal Meeks. He neglected to take the order as it was given and I have no doubt sent me an etagere that he had already made, and not worth what he charged for it[ldots]it is the last that I or anyone that I can influence shall have to do with him: he has not made anything of the consequence by his acts, as I intended to have got him to have made new furniture for one, if not both of my parlors next summer. [39]

Surget may have been persuaded to buy from Meeks because of the fact that other Natchez planters had Meeks furniture. John McMurran, for example, owned the labeled center table shown in Plate XVIL McMurran's law partner John A. Quitman (1798-1858) of Monmouth also owned Meeks furniture, as did Quitman's neighbor Samuel Boyd (d. 1867) of Arlington (see P1. XI). [40]

From trips to the showrooms of New York City, shopping in New Orleans, local purchases, and orders through agents, a wide range of furniture was available to the elite of antebellum Natchez. The market for furniture in Natchez fluctuated according to the success of the cotton crop. Planters, manufacturers, cotton agents, and commission merchants had to establish strong relationships with each other to ensure the sale and distribution of acceptable furniture--a trade that always remained tied to the Mississippi River.

The research for this article was conducted for my master's thesis in the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture. It was largely funded through a Lower Mississippi Delta Region Initiative Grant awarded by the National Parks Service and the Historic Natchez Foundation. I wish to thank J. Ritchie Garrison, Stephen G. Harrison, Ronald and Mary Warren Miller, and Richard Murphy for generously sharing their advice and research My deepest gratitude goes to the owners, friends, and staff of the furniture collections at Arlington, Lansdowne, Melrose, Rosalie, and Stanton Hall in Natchez.

JASON T. BUSCH is the assistant curator of American decorative arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

(1.) Thomas Kilby Smith Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, copy in Clifton research file, Historic Natchez Foundation, Natchez, Mississippi.

(2.) For a discussion of suburban villas, see Andrew Jackson Downing, The Architecture of Country Houses (New York, 1850).

(3.) D. Clayton James, Antebellum Natchez (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1968), p. 136, defines nabob as "man of great wealth" and, in Natchez, as "the town's privileged class[ldots]separated from the masses by distinctions of property and economic power."