Return to Virginia Business - February 2003

A long time ago, folks interested in antique furniture coronated the tables and armoires made in the Northeast the finest in the land. Everything else, they ruled, should be swept into history’s dustbin. It took awhile, but Southerners, and then the antique intelligentsia, retrieved Southern furniture from the pile. They found that Southerners made great furniture, and lots of it. A new collecting enthusiasm was born.

Now, people around the country, but particularly in the South, are increasingly spending their time hunting for furniture made not in Boston or Philadelphia, but in Richmond or Roanoke. Southern furniture is one of several collecting genres captivating the public now. “You can buy things under $1,000 and up to a million dollars, depending upon what one wants to do,” says Sumpter Priddy, an Alexandria dealer and one of the foremost experts in the world on Southern furniture.

There’s no single style that defines Southern furniture, Priddy says. It varies by region and reflects whatever local influences existed. Furniture made in much of eastern Virginia, for example, reflects the “neat and plain” style of Scottish, Irish and English craftsmen who flocked to urban areas such as Williamsburg and Norfolk in the 1700s. Western Virginia reflects the “backcountry” style of European immigrants, among them Swiss, German and French, who settled there in large numbers in the mid-1800s.

Collectors hunger for Southern Colonial-era furniture, made before 1780 and now hard to find. Between 1780 and 1825, however, there was a “golden period” of furniture making in the South when “the arts really did flourish.” Growing urban areas fueled by agriculture wealth created a market, says Priddy. “The economy was strong, there was a vast influx of artisans from abroad, from the Northeast, and then a vast number who were actually trained in these growing urban centers [in the South] as well.” Priddy says there are plenty of pieces from the 1780-1825 eras available, for a price. A single chair can cost $1,500 to as much as $100,000.

Collectors looking for a unique piece can often find something with a link to their hometown. Experts now can identify hundreds of individual artisans working across the South, from a state-by-state and even county-by-county basis. “It’s now possible for people who live in Richmond or Norfolk or Winchester, or in Danville or Roanoke, to collect things that are indigenous to those areas,” says Priddy.
After 1825 and the industrialization of the Northeast, however, everything changed, Priddy says. The South was flooded with less expensive factory-made furniture from the Northeast and Southern artisans’ businesses withered.

People planning to buy Southern furniture should first consult books detailing what was made where and when, Priddy says. They should visit dealers regularly, study the stock of Southern furniture, and ask a lot of questions. They also should consider attending one of the handfuls of conferences on Southern furniture, held regularly in cities like Williamsburg, Alexandria and Charleston, S.C., as well as at the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Winston-Salem, N.C. “This stuff is not for a novice,” Priddy says. “It’s like the stock market. A novice doesn’t go in and make a killing and walk away. It requires a lot of study.”

Bill Beck, the proprietor of Becks Antiques and Books in downtown Fredericksburg, says early 19th-century American furniture in general is popular right now, Southern and otherwise. Southern silver, too, is now a “very hot market,” Beck says. A silver Virginia teapot would cost thousands of dollars, he says.

A brisk seller at the Middleburg Antique Emporium lately has been clocks, which can run from the hundreds to tens of thousands of dollars, says owner Lesley Clark. An old grandfather clock will sell fast, but they are hard to find. Most of the ones she sells were made around 1880, but she has one built in 1720.

Why clocks? Clark doesn’t know. “I don’t think there is any accounting for what happens in the trade,” she says. “That’s just the way it goes.”

Virginia Business - February 2003