Thomas Day & His Work
Who Was Thomas Day?
Thomas Day
(1801-1861), a free African-American cabinetmaker (fine furniture maker)
and businessman, lived and worked in Caswell County, North Carolina from
the early 1820's to the early 1860's. By 1850, he operated the largest
furniture business in the state. A great deal of his furniture survived
and is cherished today in private homes
and museums primarily in North Carolina and Virginia. Day's life opens a
window into a world most Americans know little about: 19th-century
African-American history, focusing on the experience of free people of
color and their contributions to American history and culture.
Day was born in 1801 in Dinwiddie County in southern Virginia
to free African-American parents whose respective families had been
free since the early 18th century. Day and his brother, John, were educated
privately by tutors. Both followed in their father's cabinetry craft
until John Day began to study theology. John Day eventually emigrated
to Liberia in 1830 where he served first as a Baptist missionary and
later as a prominent statesman and signer of the Liberian Declaration
of Independence. He is remembered in Liberian history as a founding
father of that nation. Thomas Day moved to Milton, North Carolina in
the early 1820's and became one of the South's most famous and celebrated
furniture makers. His skills were sought by a great many plantation
owners whose homes he embellished with stylish mantle pieces, stair
railings, and newell posts, in addition to providing them with furniture.
Thomas Day maneuvered through the complex legal sanctions that confronted
free blacks at the time, often with the assistance of wealthy and influential
white patrons. For example, in 1830, Day obtained special permission
from the NC legislature for his new wife to move to North Carolina to
live with Thomas Day. A law had been passed a few years earlier prohibiting
free black migration into the state. Day sent his three children to
an abolitionist-sympathizing school, Wesleyan Academy in Wilbriham,
Massachusetts. He became a prominent member of his Milton, North Carolina
community where his furniture shop employed free black, white, and enslaved
laborers. By 1850, it was the largest furniture company in the state.
Because Day was one of the earliest furniture makers to use steam-powered
tools and mass production techniques in North Carolina, he is increasingly
considered an early founder of the modern Southern furniture industry.
By the end of his life, Thomas Day began to fall victim to a major
economic recession and the ever-tightening racial order. His business
was in receivership by the time of his death on the eve of the Civil
War.
Thomas Day is at once anomalous and representative of the antebellum
free black experience. The fact that such an extraordinary figure in
the American decorative arts could have lain in obscurity for so long
makes him a symbol of the many African Americans who anonymously contributed
to American history and culture.
James Baldwin described them like this in The
Fire Next Time:
I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women...I
am proud of these people...The country should be proud of them too,
but alas, not many people even know of their existence. And the reason
for this ignorance is that a knowledge of the role these people played
- and play - in American life would reveal more about America to Americans
than Americans wish to know.
Who Was Thomas Day? | Exhibits
of Thomas Day's Work |
Thomas Day Furniture
