Decorative Arts Trust

The Trust’s MESDA Scholar for 2009
Jerome Bias writes about his experience as a Decorative Arts Trust Scholar.

Laura Purvis and Jerome Bias experiencing woodworking.

The Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) Summer Institute 2009 was an inspiring experience that focused on the ethnicity, regionalism, and material culture of the southern backcountry. It included fascinating lectures on pottery, textile, furniture, ironworks, and material culture by experts like Barbara Carson, Leonard Todd, and Kathryn Braund. MESDA’s selection of 15 students from varying ethnic, social, and educational backgrounds allowed for conversations that were multifaceted, thought provoking, and respectful. The visiting scholar Susan Kern brought a font of energy, knowledge, and perspective.

After two weeks of lecture and research, we embarked on a tour of the Valley of Virginia, visiting museums such as Montpelier, The Frontier Culture Museum, and Preswould Plantation. Along the way, friends of MESDA greeted us and allowed us to view their private collections. The access to their collections and hospitality of our hosts at the museums and in private homes were generous gifts.

The last week of the Summer Institute culminated with a presentation of research projects that we had been working on over the course of the Institute. I presented a study comparing the construction detail similarities in furniture made by the cabinetmaker Thomas Day (1801–1861).

The Thomas Day bureau in the MESDA collection.

Thomas Day was a free Black furniture-maker working in Milton, N.C. from 1827–1861. By 1850, his enterprise grew to become the largest cabinetmaker in the state, producing one-sixth of the furniture made in the state and having a $40,000 credit rating in 1855. In 1858, due to failing health, debt from installing a steam engine, and a national financial panic that caused one out of three businesses to fail, his business was declared insolvent.

Thomas Day employed free Blacks, slaves, and white master-furniture-makers in his shop. Recent findings have suggested that Thomas Day was an abolitionist. I would like to do further research to determine the division of labor among members of his staff.

While many specific facts about his life are known, we only have a general understanding of his furniture. The positively identified body of Day’s work only represents the last 15–20 years of his career. It includes a variety of styles: gothic revival, Louis XV revival, cottage style, and vernacular. This diversity of styles and our inconclusive knowledge of his body of work has made it difficult to define what to look for in furniture made by Thomas Day.

I wanted to create a tool that could be used to identify furniture from Thomas Day’s shop, independent of the style of the piece of furniture. Given the time constraints of the Institute, I limited myself to developing an assessment sheet that could be used to analyze known Thomas Day case furniture, looking for similarities in construction details.

I compared a wardrobe and a bureau both made by Thomas Day to each other to produce the assessment sheet. I examined them for similarities and differences, both between each other and between case pieces made by contemporaries of Thomas Day. The bureau is part of the MESDA collection and the wardrobe is in a private collection.

One similarity that I found is that Thomas Day furniture tends to be heavy. He constructed many of his pieces with thicker boards than many of his contemporaries. I also observed that he used sturdy construction techniques. He constructed the glove boxes of the bureau with dovetails, when his contemporaries were using nails.


Examples of Thomas Day using a red wash to detail the visible inside components of the bureau. In this case, the back of a jewelry box and his typical staining of the dovetail on the front of his drawers.

I noticed that the ends of his case pieces are frame-and-panel, but where many of his contemporaries were using veneered panels, he was using solid panels. Thomas Day used a red wash on his furniture, both on the outside and on details on the inside of his case furniture, such as the back of the jewelry box, and the dovetails of the drawers.

Through the application of this assessment sheet on known Thomas Day case furniture, an identification pattern should be possible. The creation of such a tool allows a systematic identification of Thomas Day furniture and also furthers my goal of determining what he was making in the first twenty years of his career.

I would like to thank everyone involved with the Decorative Arts Trust for your generous support. Through your funding I have been able to deepen my understanding of the southern backcountry and integrate that into my woodwork. I have also been able to make a significant step towards my goal of discovering the early works of Thomas Day’s career. Thank you.