The variety of woodworking crafts was almost as great as the variety of trees. In Williamsburg alone—and Williamsburg was by no means an important center in this respect—mention has been found of all the following during colonial times:

cabinetmaker

carpenter

carver

chairmaker

chaisemaker

chariotmaker

coachmaker

cooper

gunstocker

joiner

millwright

sawyer

shipwright

wheelwright

woodcutter

In addition, there were such related crafts as upholsterer, lumber merchant, gilder, japanner, and coach painter.

Eighteenth-century Williamsburg was not, however, quite so crowded with woodworking craftsmen as this list would indicate. For if the guild traditions of the Old World required that each operation be the monopoly of a specific craft, in the New World practical needs tended to force a merging of related crafts. Only in a few of the big colonial cities—Philadelphia, New York, Boston, or Charleston—was demand great enough to keep some of the specialists going. Elsewhere the craftsmen of town or village had to be versatile—or go hungry. A Williamsburg cabinetmaker, thus, was likely to be also joiner, carver, and upholsterer—and probably undertaker as well.

Right here it may be well to explain the difference between joinery and cabinetmaking as crafts, always remembering that in Williamsburg and in most of colonial America both might be practiced by the same craftsmen. Joinery involved the making and installing of paneling, molding, mantel-pieces, staircases, and similar interior trim in houses. A joiner might also make furniture of the plainer sort. Cabinetmaking demanded skills of a higher order to create furniture having such refinements as curved surfaces, dovetail joints, cabriole legs, carved ornamentation, veneered or inlaid surfaces, and upholstering.

Joiner and cabinetmaker were both concerned basically with fitting together pieces of wood to make a whole structure. The pieces or parts had to be shaped, of course; and it was in the shaping processes—sawing, planing, and chiseling—that the worker’s real skill showed up. Pieces properly formed will fit together neatly and enduringly, while no amount of glue will make a sound joint of pieces that do not fit.

Two crafts always prominent in Europe are noticeably absent from the list of Williamsburg woodworking crafts. Marquetry, the intricate inlaying of patterns in contrasting woods, seems not to have been much practiced anywhere on this side of the Atlantic; probably Williamsburg cabinetmakers were rarely, if ever, called on for inlay work. The absence of turnery from the list, however, does not mean it was unknown here but only that Williamsburg cabinetmakers customarily did their own lathe work instead of sending it out to a specialist.

Here, too, may be the best place to make first acquaintance of the four Williamsburg practitioners about whom most information survives. They—and the periods of their known activity as cabinetmakers in Williamsburg—are: Peter Scott, 1732-75, who lived across the street from Bruton Parish Church and had his shop somewhere nearby, and who was, for forty years, a member of Williamsburg’s common council; Anthony Hay, 1751-67, whose “large Cabinet Maker’s Shop” has been re-created on its original Nicholson Street site, who turned innkeeper as host of the Raleigh Tavern, and whose son George, as United States attorney, prosecuted Aaron Burr for treason; Edmund Dickinson, 1764-78, who probably worked in Hay’s shop and eventually occupied it as his own master; and Benjamin Bucktrout, 1766-78, whose funeral side line became the chief business of his posterity in Williamsburg for several generations.