  As we have seen, Virginians who wanted fine furniture probably ordered it from England. But competition from across the Atlantic was not the local cabinetmaker’s only burden. A very large amount of furniture left the busy shops of New England, New York, and Philadelphia in the eighteenth century, consigned to southern ports or the West Indies. No precise figure can be stated for the size or importance of this coastwise trade, or for its importance in the life of Williamsburg cabinetmakers; it could not have made things easier for them. The interior of an eighteenth-century French marquetry establishment, with the workers using various tools. At the left is a type of vise called a “donkey”; against the wall may be seen a large cabinet bookcase, a slant-top desk, and a chest of drawers. These would have been made in a cabinet shop and brought here for inlay decoration. Whether outside competition was the cause, or simply the narrowness of the Virginia market in the first place, Williamsburg cabinetmakers—like the practitioners of other crafts—found ways to augment their incomes. Anthony Hay became proprietor of the Raleigh Tavern and Benjamin Bucktrout turned storekeeper and state functionary. The change in Hay’s case was clearly not motivated by poverty; he must have been well-to-do or at any rate well respected to have acquired backing, perhaps to the extent of £4000, to buy the Raleigh—and without selling his house, cabinet shop, and timber yard. Coffin-making was a normal part of the cabinetmaker’s business, and many cabinetmakers took what was the logical next step of serving also as funeral directors. When the popular Lord Botetourt, Governor Dunmore’s predecessor, died in Williamsburg, two of the town’s cabinetmakers Bucktrout was one of the several Williamsburg cabinetmakers who did upholstering; he also sold upholstery materials in his shop on Francis Street. By 1774 that shop had become a store—stocked with beer, cheese, spices, woolens and cottons, hats, boots, women’s and children’s shoes, gloves, guns, pistols, saddles, whips, and a number of other things—and Bucktrout had to advertise that he still did cabinet work. Eventually, however, Bucktrout seems to have abandoned his own business to put all his time and effort into serving as purveyor to the public hospitals of the state. A powder mill he devised and erected in or near Williamsburg early in the Revolution did not function for lack of saltpeter, and Bucktrout’s efforts to gain compensation or subsidy from the Assembly were in vain. Whether or not he turned Tory in 1779—and there is one accusation on record to that effect—he was back in Williamsburg soon after the defeat of Cornwallis, and remained a resident of the town for another 30 years. In 1804 he was appointed town surveyor, thereby capping a career that for versatility was matched by its virility. The widower Bucktrout must have been about 60 years old when, in 1797, he took to wife a young girl by the name of Mary Bruce. Before his death in 1812 she bore him four children, the second receiving the name Horatio. A century and a quarter later—in 1928—another Horatio Bucktrout sold the family undertaking establishment and thus brought to an end the Bucktrout saga in Williamsburg. The story of cabinetmaking as an active eighteenth-century craft in Williamsburg had ended long before, of course. |
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