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TRUST EXPLORES TIDEWATER VIRGINIA AND ITS EASTERN SHORE

Many Americans are bemused by the way residents of the mid-Atlantic states speak casually of "the Eastern Shore," as though its identity were obvious. Symposium attendees now know that the term refers to the thin spine of land stretching south from Delaware, embracing the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Its tiny farming and fishing communities are strung along a single highroad like beads on a ribbon. Never heavily populated, they appear today to be fading softly into the past.

A unique region demands exceptional guides, and we had them. Ralph Harvard, whom Trust members know as a New Yorker, is native to the area and encouraged owners of a range of 17th and 18th century homes containing regional furniture to open their doors to us. Matt Hobbs talked with us about the making of vernacular furniture and the engineering of the extraordinary highway on which we rode. Sumpter Priddy let us participate in his ever-widening search for regional furniture and its makers and with collectors who are collecting it today.

Water was the pervasive element that both bound and liberated our weekend. We met in the maritime city that still guards the entrance to the Chesapeake. We traveled the splendid Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, stretching across the mouth of the Bay. Water was a part of the landscape at most sites we visited.

With gentle opening words about the importance, especially at this time, of the gathering of like minds and good friends, Jonathan Fairbanks, Trust President and symposium moderator, asked for a moment of silence in honor of those we lost on 9/11.

Peggy McPhillips, Norfolk's City Historian, described the founding of the port, the importance of the harbor, and the speed with which it grew after 1636, when Adam Thoroughgood named it Norfolk. There's no romance about it: this has always been a hard-working, commercial port, from the days when it was 2 weeks from the West Indies and 2 months from Britain.

Explaining the region's early architecture, Ralph Harvard reinforced the importance of 17th-century Norfolk's harbor. He took us on a visual survey of the region's oldest homes, known locally as "big house, little house, colonnade, kitchen," he paused to clarify the "brick bond conundrum" that seems to be a cheerful diversion of Trust members' walking tours. His commentary made what we'd see memorable by giving us apt comparisons: the water side of a property as "the 3-car garage, where all the junk gets stowed"; the imposing ornamented chimneys as "not just service chimneys - somebody's havin' fun!"

Opening the door (black oak, covered with pitch or tar) of the homes to which we had just been introduced, Sumpter Priddy gave us a guided tour of the furniture that would have been inside. There's a strong Dutch presence in the earliest settlement; reflected in forms like ladderback chairs with box stretchers, "butterfly" tables that accompanied hanging cupboards, rectangular tables with trumpet turnings.

By the revolution, Norfolk's population was 6000, when it burned to the ground (Peggy McPhillips said its nickname had been: "Chimneyville"). But it rebuilt quickly, and there was plenty of business for cabinetmakers, with "tons" of furniture surviving from that period. Sumpter showed regional characteristics: vertically veneered drawer fronts, spiral-turned table legs, white oak as a secondary wood. And he concluded that, based on the distribution of objects and the distribution of styles, Norfolk was the major center of furniture production for the whole region.

Primed for on-site study, we bused to two of the earliest surviving homes. The Adam Thoroughgood house was properly impressive: a central entry, blackened pine paneling, an assertive inside-outside chimney, all designed to reinforce the impression of Thoroughgood's primacy. The crown, anxious to settle its colony, deeded 50 acres to each man who paid his passage there. Shrewd Thoroughgood took his (or his wife's) fortune and bought passage for many eager colonists, gaining in exchange both vast acreage and a company of indentured laborers to work it.

He was not the only astute settler. At Lynnhaven (c. 1725) we learned how a widow with five young sons ran a household and large farm, sent each to London at 18 to study law, and held her lands intact until the eldest son's majority, enabling him to inherit them!

As always at Trust symposiums, the body is fed as well as the mind. On Friday we had lunched delightedly at Charlie's Seafood, a roadside restaurant that falls into the "best kept secrets" category. Supper was an endless buffet aboard a three-masted schooner cruising the waters of the port.

Trust President Jonathan Fairbanks spoke about America's sculptors as only an artist can. From Horatio Greenough's monumental figure of Washington as Zeus - which "didn't go over well; and was so heavy that it collapsed the floor" to William Wetmore Story who "liked women [like Cleopatra] with big problems" to Augustus St. Gaudens' ethereal figure of Fame, who leads General Sherman through the wilds of mid-town Manhattan.

Demonstrating that Norfolk is a cultural metropolis, Curators Catherine Futter and Gary Baker of the Chrysler Museum introduced us to some of the museum's overwhelming collections. During our visit there we suffered from the "kid-in-a-candyshop" syndrome that marks many of our trips: lost in the extraordinary glass collections, standing bemused in the new American sculpture galleries, or rapt before the paintings, then wakening just in time to dash to the museum shop.

Catherine Futter's lecture prepared us for Moses Myers' home. Myers (d. 1835) was an adroit businessman whose papers record the economic and personal life of Norfolk's first Jewish family They assimilated brilliantly, but maintained their Jewish connections. He traded in Smithfield hams, but didn't eat pork. They owned at least three services of fine English glassware. His facility in Dutch and French made him a valuable consul in that active port. And his wife carried out her correspondence seated before a beautifully inlaid Baltimore desk.

Catherine Hollan, speaking about Norfolk silver, said she studies the decorative arts "for serious recreation." The first colonists "expected they'd be tripping over gold" so the first ship to Virginia carried a goldsmith, silversmith and jeweler. They learned very quickly. Describing the economic cycle of the Virginia planter, the tobacco shipment, the London factor, and the credit with which purchases were made, she showed how it fit the laws that forbade importation of bar silver. That, in turn, made it better business to re-fashion existing objects. And the work involved in melting, assaying, preparing and working up silver led to a preference for simple objects - mostly spoons. But spoons were significant. "Even if a man had barely a change of clothes, he owned a spoon."

Archie Johnson, from the Atlantic Wildfowl Heritage Museum, has made a lifetime study of the region's 19th century "gunning clubs" and the decoys associated with them. He shared with us not only his knowledge but his passion, and we caught the passion, clustering around tables for a "show and tell" we won't forget.

One of the benefits of a Trust symposium is the opportunity to visit private homes and collections. Our trip to Norfolk and Princess Anne County was notable for the range, variety and quality of the collections we visited (see The Magazine Antiques, December 2001, for example). Respect for the privacy of our generous hosts makes it impossible to say more than this: our enjoyment of what we saw was surpassed only by the delight we took in talking with many of them.

Now the expression "the Eastern Shore" has a very definite geographic meaning for us. It also evokes a golden fall weekend filled with companionship, learning and beauty.