In two of the bedrooms at the Brush-Everard House in Williamsburg and in one at the Raleigh Tavern stand commodious pieces of furniture that today would probably have to be called cupboards. The eighteenth-century housewife called them clothes presses, and they served her as a place to keep the family’s entire supply of bedding and clothing not in daily use.

Two of these pieces are extremely simple in design, so simple that they may be said to lack any conscious “design” at all. Some two hundred years of use testify to the sturdiness of their construction; but they were clearly not made for show. The third—the one in the ground floor bedroom of the Brush-Everard House—is more sophisticated. It is of mahogany and southern pine rather than of walnut and pine as are the other two. It has ogee-curved bracket feet instead of straight bracket feet. And it boasts a nicely made fretwork cornice.

These touches do not make it a distinguished piece of furniture or an overly beautiful one. However, the importance of these three pieces lies not in their appearance, but rather in the fact that all three have been handed down from generation to generation in the Galt family of Williamsburg and are believed to have been made by one of the town’s eighteenth-century cabinetmakers.

Samuel Galt followed the watchmaking and silversmithing craft in Williamsburg from 1750 until his death. His older son, James, was also a silversmith until he became, in 1770, the first “keeper” of the “Lunatick Hospital” in Williamsburg. The younger son, John Minson Galt, acquired a medical education in Edinburgh and London, then became a partner in Dr. James Pasteur’s apothecary and chirurgical establishment in Williamsburg.

Unfortunately the Galt family tradition does not say which of Williamsburg’s eighteenth-century craftsmen created the articles in question. The most prominent pre-Revolutionary cabinetmakers were all active during some part of the period when the Galts, father and sons, were founding the family’s name and fame. It is possible, judging from appearance alone, that the two simpler pieces could have been made for the earliest Galt by the earliest (known) cabinetmaker, Peter Scott, while the third was constructed for a later and more pretentious household by a later craftsman, perhaps Edmund Dickinson.

Dickinson was well equipped to make better furniture than any of these three clothes presses. An apprentice in Anthony Hay’s cabinet shop on Nicholson Street, he may have stayed on as journeyman during Benjamin Bucktrout’s proprietorship of the shop and timber yard. In any case, he became master of the establishment himself in 1771. Seven years later, serving as an officer in the Revolutionary army, he was killed at the Battle of Monmouth.

The appraisers of Dickinson’s estate—one of them was Bucktrout—valued his possessions at the respectable total of £164 6s. 6d. About £20 of this represented Dickinson’s library of 40 volumes. Some of these had probably been gathered by Hay in the first place, but it was still a large and wide-ranging collection of books for a craftsman. In addition to a copy of “Chippendale’s Designs” valued by itself at £6, there were books of poetry and history, English and French dictionaries, and many volumes of the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Connoisseur.