The elegant grounds of the Governor’s Palace in Williamsburg seem at first glance a most unlikely site for a cabinetmaker’s shop, especially in the time of Lord Dunmore. His Majesty’s last and unlamented viceroy in Virginia was no basement do-it-yourselfer. But after the Revolution his claim for the value of lost possessions included “A quantity of Mahogany and other Woods; with tools for four Cabinet Makers.”

Although Dunmore’s tools and lumber were probably destined for the plantation he was seating near Warm Springs as a private venture, the possibility cannot be dismissed that some furniture work was done at the Palace. At one spot on the grounds several items of cabinet hardware have been excavated. And the amount of furniture in an establishment as big as the Palace could no doubt have kept a man busy just repairing the everyday wear and tear.

Whatever the situation under the royal governors, however, the practice in 1776 was to have such work done in the shops of the town’s private entrepreneurs. When Patrick Henry was about to take up residence as the independent commonwealth’s first chief executive, the state government issued warrants to several Williamsburg cabinetmakers for making or repairing Palace furniture. Honey and Harrocks received a little more than £19 for mending 28 chairs there; £21 went to a certain Richard Booker (about whose identity there remains great uncertainty) for making some chairs; and our friend Edmund Dickinson took in £92 “for furniture furnished the Pallace.”

Judging by Bucktrout’s charge of £25 per dozen for straight chairs and £16 for a mahogany desk and bookcase, Dickinson was dealing with something on the order of 35 chairs or their equivalent in other kinds of furniture. It would appear that his shop, the same one where Anthony Hay and Benjamin Bucktrout had earlier plied their craft, was the largest such establishment in Williamsburg at the time. It has now been reconstructed, its dimensions precisely fixed by surviving foundations, and furnished as an operating craft shop according to indications of the Dickinson inventory, archaeological findings on the site, and other information.

The original shop was built about 1750 on the bank of the small stream that still flows through the Nicholson Street property. Hay bought it in 1756 and some ten years later built an addition on piers over the stream. His reason for this seemingly awkward arrangement cannot now be ascertained. No evidence indicates that he ever installed a water wheel, and in any event the stream’s flow could have operated a lathe only in the very wettest weather.

It’s an ill waterway, however, that flows nobody good! This one served a double end. In the first place, it provided a convenient place for the cabinetmakers’ apprentices to dump the trash that accumulated in the shop. And in the second place, the damp silt of the stream bed effectively preserved that trash against decay, transforming it into a twentieth-century treasure trove for today’s archaeologists.

Mention has already been made of the woodworking tools and fragments of cabinet hardware excavated at the site of the shop. Diggers also found a few component pieces of a table and chairs. Indeed the Anthony Hay shop, house, kitchen, and well have proved to be the richest archaeological dig in Williamsburg. Besides cabinet items, the colonial artifacts include domestic glass and ceramic wares, harness hardware, shoe buckles, garden tools, table utensils, and a large number of gun flints. The last, along with bits of several weapons, recall the period during the Revolution when the shop was converted into an armory.