Buzaglo's "Masterpiece" in iron - London iron founder Abraham Buzaglo

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1997 by Elizabeth Pitzer Gusler

Come to Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia, to see a masterpiece in iron, a superb artifact that combines artistic brilliance, technical virtuosity, and a remarkable political history. The icon is a not-so-lowly cast-iron stove, or "warming machine," commissioned by the royal governor of Virginia, Norborne Berkeley (c. 1718-1770), baron de Botetourt, from the London iron founder Abraham Buzaglo in the spring of 1770 as a ceremonial gift for the Virginia House of Burgesses [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. I OMITTED]. The exotic and newly fashionable device first arrived in Williamsburg in December 1770. It subsequently spent a century and a half in the Capitol in Richmond, then returned to Williamsburg in 1933 as a loan from the Commonwealth of Virginia to support the authentic restoration of Colonial Williamsburg.

The stove has a checkered history of recognition and interpretation, but there is no doubt that its maker was proud of his product. Buzaglo wrote his patron assuring that no

cost nor trouble was spared in the execution; The Elegance of workmanship and Impression of every particular joint, does honour to Great Britain, it excels in grandeur any thing ever seen of the kind, and is a Masterpiece not to be equalled in all Europe, and could not be sufficiently admired.(1)

Buzaglo's bill reveals a splendid commission. He charged 143 pounds for a "treble Tier" stove, the most elaborate model available.(2) The cost would have recompensed Botetourt's chief household officer for three years service. Such a generous personal gift from Botetourt suggests his regard for his Virginian charges, especially during politically tense times when Virginians were chafing at English rule. Lord Botetourt's untimely death in October 1770 prevented him from seeing the stove in its designated place of honor in the House of Burgesses. His heir, Henry Somerset (1744-1803), the fifth duke of Beaufort, carried out his uncle's intentions and arranged shipment of the stove to Virginia.

Virginia legislators may have perceived an ironic contrast between the symbols of English liberty and justice on Botetourt's stove in the Capitol [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED] and the royal images they associated with the stove's counterparts, also made by Buzaglo, in the Governor's Palace. There, court portraits of George III and Queen Charlotte presided over the ballroom and supper room.(3) Botetourt's presentation piece must have been a powerful and poignant reminder of the well-loved and respected diplomat who soothed political tensions between Virginia and the crown during the Stamp Act of 1765 and nonimportation crises.

During the Revolution Ebenezer Hazard (1745-1817) visited Williamsburg and noted that the stove was near the speaker's chair in the House of Burgesses.(4) In 1780 legislators, fearing that Williamsburg was vulnerable to attack by the British navy, moved the seat of government to the higher ground of Richmond and took the stove with them. The move safeguarded Botetourt's monumental gift from the fate suffered by the slightly more modest double-tiered stoves he had commissioned for the ballroom and supper room. These were undoubtedly lost in the fire of December 1781 that destroyed the Palace, then being used as a soldiers' hospital. The surviving stove served as the prototype for two reproductions made for the 1981 refurnishing of the Governor's Palace, which re-created the inventory taken at Lord Botetourt's death [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. II OMITTED].

By 1848 the stove was taken for granted in the Capitol in Richmond, where one observer called it

an interesting relic of other days, which hundreds pass annually without noticing, and which in the course of a few years will yield to the invincible attacks of the great destroyer, whom even iron cannot resist. I allude to the Old Stove, around which are congregated during the winter, the motley purveyors to the public appetite for nuts and ginger-bread, and where may be seen, during the session of the General Assembly, members of either political party mingling harmoniously the fragrant whiffs of their cigars.(5)

The writer was impressed that the stove had once warmed men who were "fired by the eloquence of Patrick Henry or persuaded by the honied accents of Richard Henry Lee." He sought information regarding the maker, and speculated that the stove may have been made on the Continent, since the "manufacturers of England were then unequal to so great an effort,"(6) revealing his ignorance of England's leading role in the Industrial Revolution, so eloquently expressed in this object.

A former delegate responded that he had admired the "fine and fanciful figures" on the "curious piece of antiquity" before it was banished from the House in disgrace because delegates gathered around it talking to one another disrupted the proceedings. Saddened that it stood "solitary and alone" in its hallway exile, with even Jean Antoine Houdon's statue of George Washington turning its back, he wished it a better fate: