Thomas Day: Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color

Thomas Day

Thomas Day

Master Craftsman and Free Man of Color

PATRICIA PHILLIPS MARSHALL AND JO RAMSAY LEIMENSTOLL

THE RICHARD HAMPTON JENRETTE SERIES IN ARCHITECTURE AND THE DECORATIVE ARTS

Published in Association with the North Carolina Museum of History by the University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

In 2002 the University of North Carolina Press received a generous grant from the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, Betty Ray McCain, Secretary, and Betsy Buford, Deputy Secretary, in support of this publication.

Unless otherwise acknowledged, architectural photography in Chapter 6 by Tim Buchman. Photographs by Mr. Buchman were supported by a grant from the Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, Inc.

Unless otherwise acknowledged, furniture photography by Eric N. Blevins and D. Kent Thompson of the North Carolina Museum of History.

©2010 NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF HISTORY

Photographs by Tim Buchman ©2010 Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, Inc. All rights reserved. Design and layout by Courtney Leigh Baker. Typeset by Rebecca Evans in Merlo and Künstler Script. Manufactured in Singapore. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Marshall, Patricia Phillips.

Thomas Day: master craftsman and free man of color /

by Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll.

p. cm.—(The Richard Hampton Jenrette series in architecture

and the decorative arts)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3341-4 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Day, Thomas, ca. 1801–ca. 1861—Criticism and interpretation.

2. Furniture—North Carolina—History—19th century.

i. Leimenstoll, Jo Ramsay. ii. Title.

nk2439.d38m37 2010

749.092—dc22 [b] 2009042759

cloth 14 13 12 11 10 5 4 3 2 1

Preservation North Carolina is grateful to the following donors for their support for the photography by Tim Buchman featured in this publication:

LEADERS

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, New York, N.Y.

The Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Durham

Preservation North Carolina Publication Endowment (created at the Community Foundation of Western North Carolina by Amy and Damon Averill)

PATRONS

Elizabeth F. Buford and Donald G. Mathews, Raleigh

Baird S. and Pauline F. Grimson, Chapel Hill

J. Myrick Howard, Raleigh

Lib McPherson, Burlington (in memory of Thomas R. McPherson)

Roger D. Ward, Greensboro

Charles M. and Shirley F. Weiss, Chapel Hill

SPONSORS

Amy Averill, Brevard

Denise R. Barnes, Ph.D., Durham

Catherine and John Bishir, Raleigh

Mr. and Mrs. J. Robert Boykin III, Wilson

Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Clement, Salisbury

Betty and Benjamin Cone Jr., Greensboro

M. L. Cuningham, Winston-Salem

Todd W. Dickinson, Hillsborough

Helen P. Hooper, Milton

Lisa Dye Janes, Durham

Dr. Houston G. Jones, Pittsboro

M. Ruth Little, Raleigh

Jerry S. Nix, Whitsett

North Caroliniana Society, Chapel Hill

Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Norwood Jr., Goldsboro

William S. and Virginia W. Powell, Chapel Hill

Norris W. Preyer, Charlotte

John L. Sanders, Chapel Hill

The Shepard Alliance For Enlightenment: Carolyn Green Boone, J.D., Durham

Mrs. Robert E. Stipe, Chapel Hill

Gwynne and Dan Taylor, Winston-Salem

Darrel J. Williams, Charlotte

For John Hope Franklin,

HISTORIAN OF THE BLACK EXPERIENCE,

WHOSE WORK DID SO MUCH TO BRING

THOMAS DAY TO WIDER ATTENTION

Contents

Foreword by Jeffrey J. Crow

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

A Cabinetmaker by Trade

CHAPTER TWO

A Good and Valuable Citizen

CHAPTER THREE

Opportunities for an Industrious Man

CHAPTER FOUR

Unavoidable Encumbrances, Gratifying Accomplishments

CHAPTER FIVE

An Assortment of Fine and Fashionable Furniture

CHAPTER SIX

Bold and Expressive Architectural Woodwork

EPILOGUE

An Enduring Legacy

APPENDIX A

John Day Sr. Estate Papers

APPENDIX B

Petition from the citizens of Milton on behalf of Thomas Day, 1830

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Foreword

By almost any measure, Thomas Day was an extraordinary figure. A free person of color in a slave society, he became a master craftsman. Residing in Milton, a small town in Caswell County, he established a flourishing furniture business bolstered by the tobacco culture of North Carolina and Virginia. So that his wife, Aquilla Wilson Day, who lived in Virginia, could join him in Caswell County, Thomas Day successfully petitioned the North Carolina General Assembly to admit her to the state. North Carolina law prohibited the migration of free blacks into the state. Despite his status as a free person of color, Day owned slaves. Indeed, he employed black and white artisans and laborers in his workshop at Milton. In an age when enslaved people and whites attended church in segregated pews, Day sat among whites in the local Presbyterian church. Thomas Day defied the norms of antebellum society and the expectations of history.

Over the years Day's story has attracted the interest of a handful of furniture collectors and a few scholars, notably John Hope Franklin. In 1975 the North Carolina Museum of History took a big step toward rescuing the African American cabinetmaker's career and craft from the shadows of history by acquiring the Governor David Settle Reid furniture collection. That collection formed the basis of a landmark exhibit curated by Rodney Barfield. Since then the museum has displayed Day's work and built entire exhibits and programs around him. This book culminates the collective efforts of a generation of scholars and museum curators to preserve Day's exceptional artistry and to interpret his unique story.

Patricia Phillips Marshall and Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll, the authors of this book, helped to lead the Thomas Day renaissance. From small beginnings in the 1970s, the North Carolina Museum of History's collection of Day furnishings grew from nineteen objects to twenty-six in 1992. That year Marshall joined the staff of the museum as the curator of furnishings and decorative arts. In the years since, she has more than doubled the museum's collection by adding thirty more pieces. In 1996 she organized a major exhibit of Day's craftsmanship— not just furniture but architectural details, too. The North Carolina Museum of History holds the largest collection of Thomas Day furniture in the world. Marshall also has worked tirelessly to separate fact from fiction in earlier accounts of Day's life and career. In this volume she offers an authoritative biography of Day based on thorough and painstaking research.

Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll approached Day from the standpoint of historic architecture. A preservation architect at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, she and her husband, Jerry, have spent nearly twenty years helping to restore Union Tavern. Thomas Day purchased the tavern in 1848 and converted it into a residence and workshop for his cabinetmaking business. Because of Day's association with the building, the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places designated it as a National Historic Landmark in 1975. Unfortunately, a 1989 fire severely damaged the structure. Under the leadership of Myrick Howard, Preservation North Carolina, Inc., purchased the landmark and saved it from further deterioration with the help of a grassroots organization in Milton. (Preservation North Carolina also raised the money to engage Tim Buchman to photograph the interior woodwork for inclusion in this book.) To my good fortune, in the late 1990s Jo Leimenstoll gave me a personal tour of Union Tavern and the Presbyterian church in Milton where Day worshiped. It was a memorable day. The tavern restoration project served as a springboard for Jo's extensive fieldwork documenting Day's woodwork in Caswell County and beyond.

The North Carolina Museum of History has spread Thomas Day's story to a national audience in other ways. In 2004 then-director Elizabeth F. Buford secured a $301,000 teacher training grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grant underwrote four five-day teacher workshops in African American history and culture titled Crafting Freedom: Thomas Day and Elizabeth Keckly, Black Artisans and Entrepreneurs in the Making of America. Educators and curators at the museum conducted the workshops in association with the Thomas Day Education Project, led by Laurel Sneed. Teachers from as far away as Hawaii attended the workshops.

Once a mere curiosity, Thomas Day's artisanship now commands national respect and attention. This book, through exquisite photography and careful documentation, restores a distant time and place when a skilled cabinetmaker carved a small patch of freedom from the slave society in which he lived and worked.

June 2009

Jeffrey J. Crow, Deputy Secretary

North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources

Thomas Day

Introduction

The creative genius of Thomas Day, expressed through his furniture and architectural woodwork, has for more than 150 years captivated those who know his work. He was a trained artisan, a prolific master cabinetmaker and skilled architectural woodworker, who constructed furniture and interior architectural elements that survived a civil war and the ravages of time. Day imbued everything he built with robust and idiosyncratic motifs, undulating shapes, fluid lines, and spiraling forms that burst with energy and movement, all of which reveal the distinctive mark of his brilliance.

A free person of color in the time of slavery, Day rose above his assigned station in life. He was a clever man who possessed enormous talent, intelligence, strength, character, resilience, and faith. He had little choice but to work within a system that was inherently unfair to all nonwhites, and he successfully manipulated that system to his advantage, carving out a life for himself and his loved ones.

Day has long been recognized for his fine furniture, and now that we know much more about the volume and distinctiveness of his interior woodwork, we understand that Day crafted both the envelope and the contents, the architectural interior and the furniture, in an amazing and singular way. Such a distinctive design aesthetic and productivity in both the furniture and interior realms is indeed rare.¹ That this forward-looking work emanated from a shop in rural North Carolina in the mid-1800s adds to the mystery surrounding this fascinating man.

A photograph in a book published in 1941 about exceptional North Carolina houses attests to the story of this larger-than-life figure (fig. i.1). The picture is of Rose Hill, the Caswell County home of Senator Bedford Brown, who represented North Carolina before the Civil War. Photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston composed the image to highlight not only the room but the curvaceous features of both the mantel and the lounge directly in front of it, both of which bear the unmistakable visual signature of their maker, Thomas Day.² It is no accident that the lounge still stood in this room nearly a century after it was made. Families in Caswell County cherished and displayed Day's work, and ownership of Day's furniture and woodwork conferred status on a family. The significance of Johnston's decision to feature both interior woodwork and furniture in the photograph also underscores the importance of understanding the relationship between Day's furniture and woodwork. In the pages that follow, we provide the first opportunity to view Day's prolific furniture and woodwork legacy in a systematic way.

Thomas Day stands out as one of the few free people of color to leave behind a substantial body of material that can be used to interpret his life. This includes the usual documentary evidence, such as federal census returns, petitions, court papers, business records, and personal correspondence, but also a wealth of tangible objects that he created in his cabinet shop. This comprehensive analysis of his woodwork and furniture in turn reveals insights about his artistic repertoire and illuminates the evolution of Day's work over time.

In the 1820s, Thomas Day established a cabinet shop in the town of Milton, a bustling economic center for the Dan River region that encompassed at least six counties in North Carolina and Virginia. He initially earned his reputation by providing fine furniture for wealthy planters and middle-class merchants. During the 1840s and 1850s, Day expanded his repertoire, designing and installing architectural woodwork for tobacco planters flush with new wealth who decided to build big new homes or update and expand their existing ones. Day's location in Milton, combined with his well-established reputation among the region's elite, placed him in a prime position to produce the architectural woodwork for this regional building boom. For twenty years people of means had chosen Day to make their furniture, and as they began to build homes that announced their financial success and respectability, they selected him to execute their interior woodwork as well.

Although Day was one of many free black artisans in the building and furniture trades, his success set him apart. The majority of these artisans worked by the piece or by a day's labor and seldom accumulated substantial property.³ In contrast, Day owned his home, a shop in town, a farm and land in the country, and even slaves. To accommodate his burgeoning business and probably to reflect his position in the community, in 1848 Day purchased the Union Tavern building (fig. i.2). Two years later, Day's woodworking shop was the largest in the state, and his property holdings (both land and slaves) placed him among the county's wealthiest residents.⁴ He remained there for more than a decade, until the effects of the panic of 1857 and ill health took their toll on his business and on Day himself.

Fig I.1. Photograph of Rose Hill mantel and lounge by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1941. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.

Between 1830 and 1860, the Dan River community encompassed a broad network of progressive men engaged in agricultural pursuits, manufacturing, and trade. They recognized Day's talent and welcomed the economic contributions he could make to the town of Milton. It is a testament to Day's character and abilities that these white southerners turned to a man of mixed race to design and fabricate the furnishings and interiors for their homes. Throughout his career in Milton, Day shrewdly aligned himself with the town's movers and shakers, and they responded by supporting him in various ways throughout his career. Many of them worshiped at the Presbyterian church, and they accepted Day and his wife as full members in their spiritual fraternity. On a day-to-day basis, people in the white community treated him with the respect they accorded master craftsmen and talented artisans who were white, generally addressing him as Mr. Day, not as Tom. Yet many of these same individuals also supported legislation during these decades that increasingly restricted the movements and activities of the free black class to which Day technically belonged.

Day's story— and his presence on the antebellum landscape of North Carolina— has been the subject of much scholarship and debate.⁵ This book builds on the work of numerous researchers and the oral traditions that have contributed to our understanding of different aspects of Day's life or work. The story of free blacks in North Carolina began emerging in the 1940s, after a young African American scholar, John Hope Franklin, combed through every record he could find in the state archives and then published a study of their lives. His book gave free blacks a place in North Carolina history by revealing the trials and tribulations they endured while living within a rigid slave-dominated society. Among those he highlighted stood Thomas Day, whom Franklin identified as a unique figure. Seven years later, William A. Robinson, Day's great-grandson, wrote a scholarly article that quoted two lengthy letters Day wrote to his daughter in 1851.⁶

Fig i.2. Union Tavern/ Thomas Day House, Milton, N.C. Photo by Tim Buchman.

Prior to the 1970s, every essay written about Thomas Day included photographs of his furniture, forms with undulating lines and idiosyncratic motifs, but the artifacts themselves remained safely ensconced in their original plantation homes, away from public view. No institution owned any of Day's furniture. In 1974 the granddaughter of North Carolina's antebellum governor David Settle Reid called upon historian Lindley Butler to help with the disposal of her grandfather's estate. Butler assisted with the transfer of Reid's personal papers to the state archives (including obtaining copies of bills-of-sale from Day) and nineteen pieces of Thomas Day furniture to the North Carolina Museum of History, which was made possible with financial assistance from Delta Sigma Theta, Inc.⁷ Museum administrator John Ellington sent staff member Rodney Barfield out into Caswell County to do a field survey of Thomas Day furniture. In 1975 Barfield curated the museum's exhibit Thomas Day, Cabinetmaker, which was accompanied by the first catalog of Day's work to appear in print.⁸

Concurrent with the museum's fieldwork, Ruth Little and Tony Wrenn conducted an architectural survey of the historic structures in Caswell County through the auspices of the North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office. In their fieldwork they found several examples of Thomas Day's work. Ongoing countywide architectural surveys documented buildings with Day's architectural trim in neighboring Person County and Rockingham County. By the 1990s, James and Marilyn Melchor had spread the study of Day's architectural trim into Halifax County, Virginia.⁹ All of these surveys expanded the known inventory of Day's legacy. Although there have been losses across the cultural landscape, a large quantity of his woodwork survives after more than 150 years. Several factors are responsible for this, including the region's almost nonexistent pace of development in the years following the Civil War, but perhaps the most important element has been the esteem accorded to Thomas Day by North Carolinians and Virginians in the Dan River region.

In 1975, owing to its association with Thomas Day, the Union Tavern earned designation as a National Historic Landmark. The building remained in private hands until 1989, when it was severely damaged by fire. The Historic Preservation Foundation of North Carolina, Inc. (Preservation North Carolina), the state's principal nonprofit organization for historic preservation, purchased the structure and then assisted in the establishment of a local nonprofit organization: Thomas Day House/Union Tavern Restoration. The organization purchased the building from Preservation North Carolina and, under the dedicated leadership of its president Marian Thomas, substantially restored the landmark building. Although the restoration is ongoing, the building already provides a physical context for the celebration of Thomas Day and his work.¹⁰

A flurry of research into Day's life and work occurred during the 1990s. In 1995 the Thomas Day Education Project began its energetic mission to educate the public about Thomas Day and his life as a free African American in the antebellum South. The project, directed by Laurel Sneed, has uncovered new, intriguing information on the Day family and their connections to the larger free African American society while producing an array of materials for teachers to use as they incorporate African American history into the classroom.¹¹

The following year the North Carolina Museum of History, having moved into a new facility, mounted With All Necessary Care and Attention: The Artistry of Thomas Day, which allowed the exhibit team to compare Day's work to that of other nineteenth-century cabinetmakers. The team also developed an audiovisual film that addressed the impact of steam on Day's business. Beginning with the original work by Barfield, the museum has continued to collect Thomas Day pieces. Since 1992 it has more than doubled the Thomas Day collection, adding thirty more pieces of furniture, and has conducted extensive research on Day. Today the North Carolina Museum of History holds the largest collection of Thomas Day furniture in the world.

An intense debate arose over the origins of Day's unique style in the creation of his furniture and architectural elements. The study of African American artists had exploded with such publications as John Michael Vlach's By the Work of Their Hands, which identified the folk traditions of Africa within crafts of African American craftspeople. Derrick Beard expanded that notion in the traveling exhibit Sankofa: A Celebration of African-American Arts and Crafts, 1790–1930 and theorized that African tribal art had influenced Day's decorative motifs. The most influential contribution, however, came from Jonathan Prown, who in a lecture and subsequent article advised caution in the efforts to connect Thomas Day with African antecedents. Prown pointed out that the motifs identified as African also appeared in the work of Anglo American artists and suggested that perhaps Day's designs drew upon improvisational techniques that were common among African American artists.¹² He called for more research in the areas of African American craftsmanship and the African diaspora, and he urged researchers to develop a matrix of Thomas Day's construction techniques and design motifs in order to make further advances in identifying his work.

Working in our own respective areas of scholarship, we took Prown's words of caution as a challenge. We decided to focus on identifying a distinct body of documentable examples of Day's furniture and architectural woodwork. Our research efforts yielded information on more than 200 pieces of furniture and, in over 80 buildings, nearly 200 mantels and at least 50 stair newels produced by Day's shop. Next we studied and analyzed these artifacts and compared them to work by Day's contemporaries, both urban and rural, to obtain an understanding of the evolution of Day's design aesthetic within the Dan River region. Finally, after sorting the truth from the mythology that had enveloped Day in the twentieth century, we tried to place Thomas Day in the broader context of antebellum history.

This book is the result of our interdisciplinary collaboration. In it we describe both the life and work of Thomas Day in a comprehensive fashion. The first part chronicles the beginnings of Day's career, his growing reputation as a craftsman, the acme of his success at midcentury, and the unfortunate unraveling of his business in the antebellum world, ending with his death just prior to the Civil War. The second part focuses on his output— first the furniture, then the architectural woodwork— and traces how, once he had achieved a satisfactory design, he made slight changes so that each customer received a unique product, a practice that he followed even after mechanizing his shop. Together the two parts of the book demonstrate how one extraordinary craftsman, a free man of color who set up shop in the Dan River region in the 1820s, tenaciously shaped his business and tweaked his designs for more than thirty years; attracted a large following among the region's white planter elite and mercantile middle class, many of them repeat customers; and, for a time, emerged as the state's most successful cabinetmaker.

One

A Cabinetmaker by Trade

Amidst the contradictions, mysteries, and human interactions of a southern society in which one's origin and station did not always adhere to the rules of race as outlined by the white majority, the Day family emerged. The ongoing use of Africans as enslaved laborers in the British North American colonies dated to the early years of settlement, but with the passage of time, a very small handful of persons of African descent in each generation managed to shake off the bonds of slavery, enter the ranks of free people, and remain in the South. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, some of these people were landholders, some were artisans, and some were laborers; some traced their ancestry to early seventeenthcentury free black families, some were beholden to the surge for manumission and emancipation that had occurred during the colonial War for Independence, and yet others, despite recurrent white attempts to legislate the personal relationships of people of color, were the children of mixed-race unions, individuals who were not always enslaved at birth and a few of whom joined a growing class of free people of color.¹ The Days were one such family.

John Day, Thomas Day's father, began life in North Carolina, the illegitimate grandson of R. Day of S[outh] Carolina, whose daughter [had] humbled herself to her coach driver. When the young woman's pregnancy had become apparent, her parents sent her to stay with a Quaker family who lived at the fork of the Yadkin River, in what is now Rowan County in the center of the state.² After providing funds toward the rearing and education of his mulatto grandson, Day fetched his daughter back to South Carolina. Her infant remained in North Carolina and was raised in a white family whose tenets of faith stood at odds with the values of the larger slaveholding society.³

Most details of John Day's early life remain shrouded in mystery; however, some aspects can be inferred.⁴ In 1762 the North Carolina General Assembly statutes required all free base-born children to be bound out in apprenticeships until age twenty-one.⁵ By law, a master had to instruct his ward in the art and mystery of a trade; provide food, clothing, and lodging; and teach the apprentice to read and write.⁶ Yet within the state several sorts of apprenticeships existed, some of which sidestepped the court system. John Day's fell into the latter category, as official records make no mention of it.⁷ Either a member of the family who raised him taught the young man the trade of a cabinetmaker or the family assigned him to a cabinetmaker informally, a verbal agreement sealed by a handshake. During the 1770s and 1780s, several skilled cabinetmakers and joiners had shops in the western Piedmont, and John Day could have trained with any of them.⁸

By 1792 Day had completed his apprenticeship and was on his own. He settled in Southside Virginia, which had an established community of free people of color.⁹ The area's largest city, Petersburg, located at the falls of the Appomattox River, had emerged as a regional economic center for the Virginia and North Carolina tobacco markets. Its growth attracted numerous skilled artisans who could produce quality goods for the planters who lived in the region. Day, probably a journeyman at this point, likely worked in one or more of the ten cabinet shops that operated in Petersburg between 1780 and 1800.¹⁰

About the mid-1790s, John Day married Mourning Stewart. Her father, Dr. Thomas Stewart, a free mulatto, owned considerable property (874 acres of land and several slaves) in Dinwiddie County, adjacent to Petersburg.¹¹ Soon the young couple had two sons: John Day Jr., born in Greensville County in 1797, and Thomas, born in Dinwiddie County in 1801.¹²

John and Mourning Day wanted their children to gain an education. As John Jr. later recalled, My father's respectability procured for me a place in old Mr. Edward Whitehorne's house of a border and I was sent to school with his children to a Jonathan Bailey. Then [my father] purchased a plantation in Sussex County near Mr. Whitehorn in 1807. I was entered in school under Mr. William Norcross of that neighborhood.¹³ Likely Thomas, who was four years younger, received a similar education. Sometime during the next decade John Sr. began teaching his sons the art and mystery of cabinetmaking, beginning a family tradition of craftsmanship.

That same decade the Day household endured several years of turmoil. John Jr. described his father as intemperate, a term often used to connote a drinking problem, which may explain the sudden sale of their family's pretty little plantation in Sussex County in 1810. As the elder Day battled his private demons, the family relocated three more times between 1814 and 1817. The last move took them to Warren County, North Carolina, and left twenty-year-old John Jr. shouldered with the responsibility to pay his father's debt to John Bolling in Virginia.¹⁴

The decision to move to North Carolina may have stemmed from economic conditions, too. Petersburg's dominance as a regional furniture-making center had slipped. The strongest challenges came from cabinet shops in the northern states, which benefited from both economies of scale and the improvements in the transportation system that gave them better access to inland ports such as Petersburg.¹⁵ As early as 1804, cabinetmaker Thomas Reynolds had left Petersburg for Warrenton, North Carolina, where he employed numerous apprentices and journeymen, both white and black, and boasted he could produce furniture equal to that "executed a la mode [in] New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore &c."¹⁶

Another likely factor influencing the elder Day's decision to move was the growing prejudice that increasingly constrained the activities of free blacks in Virginia. North Carolina had less restrictive policies, and this in turn led to a substantial immigration of free blacks into the counties bordering both Virginia and South Carolina.¹⁷

John Day Sr. joined this exodus, relocating the family about seventy-five miles southwest of Petersburg to the James Bullock property in the old Nutbush community of Warren County. This new locale suited the elder Day, and he lived the remainder of his life in Warren County. The 1820 Census records list him as being over forty-five years of age and the head of a household that included his wife and three young men under the age of twenty-six. Those same records indicate four members of the household were engaged in manufacturing. In 1830 his workforce had shrunk by half, and two years later the sixty-six-year-old cabinetmaker died.¹⁸

Little is known about John Day Sr.'s stylistic work in Warren County, since no furniture has been positively attributed to him; however, the inventory taken in 1832 indicates that he was capable of producing a variety of fine furniture and other goods. His shop held 3 Work benches with Screws and a well-equipped tool chest, the contents of which included molding and plough planes, chisels, gouges, augers, gauges, hand screws, and an assortment of hand, tenon, bow, and veneering saws. Other equipment included a Turners Lath with wheel, two screw-cutting machines, a grindstone, oil stone, a paint stone, a paint box, a jack, trowel, and a glue pot (see Appendix A). Two of the three benches were stocked with a complement of tools; the third bench was grouped with the Paint & Oil Stone, indicating Day had designated it as a place to apply finishes or perhaps graining or other decorative faux finishes. At the time of the inventory, the shop also housed a few pieces of case furniture, including a secretary bookcase, a dining room sideboard, and bedsteads. Miscellaneous notations in the document included specific charges for Putting feet to Secretary, turng drops for cornice, Glue Table bases, makeing two Plow Stocks, 1 pr Chair wheels, and 1 pr Shafts & Cross piece.¹⁹ John Day Sr. was indeed producing fine furniture, as the secretary bookcase was valued at $30 and the sideboard at $25.

When he began to train his sons more than a decade and a half earlier, John Sr. had instructed them in the art and mystery of cabinetmaking by having them help him construct case furniture, cut veneers, turn drops and other elements, grind paint, and cut screws. He likely taught them to repair broken furniture and to construct agricultural implements such as plow stocks, which were breadand-butter work for most cabinetmakers. During these years his sons would have learned the value in accepting any job or request within their capabilities and talents.

Prospects in the Piedmont

In 1821 John Jr. and Thomas Day chose to move west to the state's rapidly developing Piedmont region, but they did so for different reasons.²⁰ For inhabitants of northern North Carolina in