Early American furniture in the New Castle Historical Society in Delaware

Magazine Antiques, May, 2005 by Philip D. Zimmerman

The New Castle Historical Society in Delaware was founded in 1934, three years after a group saved the Amstel House, an early eighteenth-century brick structure named in honor of New Amstel, which was renamed New Castle in 1665. (1) Another local group that restored and furnished the Dutch House in the 1930s became part of the society by the mid-1940s. The furniture displayed in these two houses includes examples of local and national interest. Some locally owned examples expand our knowledge of Delaware-made furniture; others represent the region more broadly. Acquisitions for the Dutch House include important New York examples. (2)

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New Castle and other early settlements along the Delaware River traded ideas and products readily with Philadelphia. Consequently, local furniture looked much like Philadelphia work, introducing uncertainty into efforts to distinguish Delaware furniture today. However, historical records establish that Vincent Loockerman (1722-1785) of Dover, Delaware, purchased tables and chairs from the Philadelphia furniture maker Benjamin Randolph (1721-1791). (3) And an account book identified as that of the New Castle cabinetmaker Thomas Janvier (1772-1852) establishes that he made furniture in the mid-1790s for Daniel Trotter (1747-1800), a Philadelphia cabinet-maker. (4) To overcome the inherent complexities of identifying Delaware-made furniture, a reasonable standard is that 1) the furniture in question must have a credible association with Delaware, typically through verifiable ownership history, and 2) it must exhibit one or more physical characteristics that separate it from Philadelphia furniture-making practices.

Several pieces of furniture in the society's collection descended in the Van Dyke and Johns families of New Castle and are key documents of local ownership and possible Delaware manufacture. They include a pair of cherry side chairs (see Pl. II), a walnut dressing table (Pl. III), a pair of dining tables (see Pl. IV), and a pair of mahogany four-drawer chests (see Pl. VII). According to early twentieth-century oral traditions, this furniture descended from Nicholas Van Dyke (1738-1789), who lived in the Amstel House while he was president of Delaware from 1783 to 1786. His daughter Ann (1768-1839) married Kensey Johns (1759-1848) in 1784, and their daughter Fidelia (1785-1871) married Thomas Stockton (1781-1846), a governor of Delaware. These and other elite families of Delaware intermarried throughout the nineteenth century, introducing uncertainty into specific paths of descent but not the fact of local ownership.

The side chair shown in Plate II is one of a pair that are probably Delaware products. For the most part their design resembles Philadelphia work: the strapwork splat, eared crest, shells on the knees of the front cabriole legs with claw-and-ball feet, and several smaller details cannot be separated from chairs made in Philadelphia or many surrounding communities. However, a combination of several telling details occurs only on these and other Delaware-owned chairs. Foremost among them is the shell on the crest (Pl. IIa). In addition to its shape, its flanges are textured with wiggly lines and dots, in contrast to the ubiquitous concentric arcs flanking Philadelphia shells. This treatment recalls one other instance in which cross-hatching textures the flanges (see Pl. I). That chair, also made of cherry, descended in the Ridgely family of Dover. It shares many construction techniques and the identical splat pattern, and was almost certainly made in the same shop as the chair in Plate II. (5) The molding profile along the tops of the seat rails is rounded in the center and has smaller beads at each side. Almost all chairs with splats of this strapwork design have a deep quarter-round molding above a fillet (although some nonurban examples have no cut molding). This particular molding in combination with a variant of this splat design occurs in an armchair of probable Dover origin. (6) As with the New Castle chair, that armchair has small volutes cut into the knee brackets, a feature that occurs occasionally in Philadelphia work yet is sufficiently distinctive that it helps to relate these chairs to one another. The round shell in the front seat rail resembles several different Philadelphia versions that are often associated with John Elliott Sr., an identification that requires further substantiation.

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The walnut dressing table in Plate III has the same history of ownership as the chairs, but it differs greatly in design. It has trifid feet on cabriole legs without shells on the knees. The dominant decorative feature is the array of ornate brasses with pierced backplates. Faint scars marking the original pierced backplates confirm that the simpler brass bails on the top drawer are replacements. A clue to where the dressing table might have been made lies in the shaping of the skirt. From a high central half-round, the skirt descends along cyma or ogee curves to cusps that set off shallow arches with small half-rounds in the middle. The same profile occurs in several dressing tables and high chests that in 1936 were in Haddonfield, New Jersey, collections. (7) Although none of these objects has a reliable eighteenth-century provenance, the fact that they are clustered in a single region combined with the relative scarcity of this particular skirt design elsewhere suggests a possible place of origin. Haddonfield is across the Delaware River from the southern end of Philadelphia, where William Savery (1721/22-1787) made and labeled a high chest with a similar skirt design. (8) New Castle, in turn, was readily accessible to both Haddonfield and Philadelphia by water.