Living with antiques: Millford Plantation in South Carolina

Magazine Antiques, May, 1997 by Thomas Gordon Smith

The January 1842 bill from Phyfe and Brother(35) also includes "2 carvd Chairs (Antique)" that had been made in January 1841, and a letter dated January 7, 1842, notes that "2 antique chairs for library" were packed in box four of the January 1842 shipment.(36) These references probably describe chairs in the French "antique," possibly rococo revival, style, as opposed to the modern Grecian style that characterizes most of the furniture Phyfe and Son supplied for the house. The chair shown in Plate XIII is one of a pair that could be the "antique" chairs.(37) They are made of chestnut, and the knees of the cabriole legs are embellished with floral carving. The narrow waist of the back is particularly striking. We most often associate Duncan Phyfe with classical forms, and the style of these chairs is in an entirely different aesthetic.

If these chairs were indeed made by Phyfe and Son (and upholstered by Phyfe and Brother), they oblige us to expand our vision of the cabinetmaker late in his career. It makes sense that Phyfe would have been as responsive to the British and French nostalgia for the eighteenth century that occurred during the 1840s as the firm had been to the French Restauration style in the 1830s. For example, "1 rosewood Sofa style of Louis XIV Serpentine front" is listed as lot 354 in the 1847 liquidation sale of Phyfe's stock.(38)

At Millford Plantation Richard Jenrette has reassembled the Manning legacy on many levels thanks to the abundance of documentation preserved by Manning's descendants. The remarkably harmonious environment he has created expands our understanding of American culture before the Civil War.

1 Page Smith, Trial by Fire: A People's History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (Penguin, New York, 1982), p. 545.

2 Rev. William Wynn Mood, "Recollections of Potter's Raid," Watchman and Southron, beginning on July 8, 1886, in twenty-four installments; cited by Thomas M. stubbs in "Millford," a paper given before the Sumter County Historical Society, Sumter, South Carolina, October 17, 1966.

3 Anne King Gregorie, History of Sumter County, South Carolina (Library Board of Sumter County, Sumter, South Carolina, 1954), pp. 269-271.

4 Three of Jenrette's other houses have been published in ANTIQUES: June 1982, pp. 1400-1410; May 1989, pp. 1190-1201; and May 1990, pp. 1154-1165.

5 A rich archive is the Williams-Chesnut-Manning Papers in the South Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina in Columbia. I wish to thank Wendy Cooper, the curator of furniture at the Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library in Winterthur, Delaware, for alerting me to the existence of these documents. Francis McNairy of Savannah, Georgia, provided the initial suggestion for the project, and Robert Leath of the Historic Charleston Foundation in Charleston, South Carolina, has also provided valuable encouragement.

6 Virginia Meynard, The Venturers: The Hampton, Harrison and Earle Families of Virginia, South Carolina and Texas (Southern History Press, Easley, South Carolina, 1981), pp. 517-520.