A piece of furniture need not be made entirely of prime wood, and rarely was. In the parlor of the Brush-Everard House in Williamsburg, for example, stands a sofa made in Philadelphia about 1770; it has eight legs that show, made of mahogany, and a frame that does not show, constructed of chestnut, maple, pine, and tulip poplar. Not every article can boast so many secondary woods, though the colonial cabinetmaker had a wide choice. The secretary-bookcase in the library of the same house was possibly made in Williamsburg and shows the more usual combination of walnut and pine as primary and secondary woods.

Colonial cabinetmakers customarily selected a secondary wood that answered the construction requirements of the article in question and that was locally available and therefore cheap. The secondary wood in a piece of colonial furniture is often the best clue to the place where it was made. Yellow pine and tulip poplar were most often used in Virginia and the other southern colonies; Hay and his successors would doubtless have stocked goodly amounts of both, and very likely also some white cedar and cypress.

Probably no list of the materials that might have been used in colonial cabinetry can hope to be complete. None, certainly, could pretend to completeness that did not include a word about nails, screws, glue, and cabinet hardware.

The colonial cabinetmaker used heated animal glue regularly. It was indispensable for veneering; for attaching carved surfaces and ornaments to their plain foundations it was almost as important; and any joint, however carefully made, was stouter for a bit of adhesive.

The eighteenth-century upholsterer, of course, could not have done his work without brass tacks, and quantities of them have been found in the course of archaeological excavation at the site of the Hay-Bucktrout-Dickinson cabinet shop on Nicholson Street. The colonial cabinetmaker sometimes used small nails for such special purposes as attaching drawer guides. But he would no more have nailed together a piece of furniture than would his modern counterpart. Screws he did use, for attaching cleats, braces, hinges, or other hardware. He used as few as possible, however, since all screws were handmade, probably imported, and certainly not cheap. If a joint needed to be reinforced, he used wooden pegs, not screws. (Treenails, used in house framing, were simply large pegs.)

Even the simplest piece of case furniture—such as a chest, press, bookcase, clock case, dressing table, or sideboard—needed at least one lock and possibly a set of hinges before it could leave the cabinetmaker’s hands as a finished article. These items of hardware could be of iron on the cruder examples of cabinet work or of brass on the better ones. The door handles, drawer pulls, escutcheon plates, and other visible hardware on finer pieces were almost sure to be of brass, to be designed for ornament as well as utility, and to be imported.

A number of brass hardware items—whole and cut-down hinges and escutcheon plates in particular—have been excavated at the site of the Hay shop, most of them in ground levels associated with Dickinson’s tenure. These seem to say that Dickinson was accustomed to working with fine furniture.