Food safe

Date1680-1720

MediumAsh and yellow pine (all by microanalysis).

DimensionsOH: 40 1/4"OW:29 3/4"OD:19 1/4"

Credit LineMuseum Purchase

Object number1953-388

DescriptionAppearance: flat rectangular top; solid back; sides and front framed with plain rectangular members except for front skirt which is cut out along bottom edge; door at front side occupies two thirds of front; hinged at right on original butterfly hinges; single shelf inside composed of two loose boards; four straight, sausage turned legs which are continuations of side posts and terminate in "potato masher" feet with applied domed wood bosses on underside.

Construction: The horizontal backboards and top boards are wrought-nailed in place. The top boards were originally reinforced with nailed-on battens, only one of which survives. The rails are tenoned into the legs and fixed with single pins. All four feet, though original, are bored out to receive the doweled ends of the legs. The door frame is lap-joined and further secured with wooden pins and wrought-iron nails. The door stile rests in mitered lap joints and is multiply nailed and pinned. A thin door stop is wrought-nailed to the inside of the left stile; the thin shelf supports are similarly secured. A wooden hasp secures the door. The iron hinges are wrought-nailed to the door frame and door stile. The replaced textile covering is face-nailed to the case and secured with replacement leather strips.

Materials: Ash legs and rails; yellow pine top, top batten, backboards, door frame, door stile, door stop, and shelf supports. All by microanalysis.
Label TextHouseholders in early America spent a great deal of time and energy protecting food from vermin. In the South, they often stored food, drink, and tallow candles in cool, dark cellars where unglazed windows provided ventilation but allowed access by hungry pests. To combat the problem, usually unglazed cellar windows were fitted with wooden mullions that kept out larger animals. Some people added heavy-gauge wire screens to stave off rodents. Virginian Robert Beverley ordered "proper wire" for the cellar windows at Blandfield, his Essex County plantation, in 1775. Most people similarly covered the ventilation holes on dairies and milk houses with coarse linen in an effort to protect their contents from insects.

Food safes like the one shown here are conceptually related to screened cellars and milk houses. Designed for the short-term storage of fresh or recently cooked foods, safes in the South can be traced to the earliest decades of settlement. In 1660, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Ludlowe kept "A Safe very old" in the "Buttery" of his York County, Virginia, residence. Despite the numerous written references, however, few of these utilitarian objects have survived.

Discovered in the early twentieth century in a church near the Virginia-North Carolina border, the CWF safe is the earliest southern example known. It stands on bulbous turned legs akin to those on southern tables from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The turning pattern was probably introduced by immigrants from northern Europe.

The front and sides of many safes were originally covered with a textile akin to the rough linen now in place. Not all southern food safes were so protected, however. When Robert Beverley ordered wire for his cellar windows in 1775, he instructed his London agent to "add to my former order as much wire as will make a Safe, for the Preservation of Meat--it shd. admit of 4 Doors about 3 Feet high the uppermost & two Feet wide, & the lower to be about 2 Feet square--They are to have be [sic] made folding, Were to be made low [i.e., small] enough to keep out Flies--The Frame work Knitters will know the size of the Safe, & the Kind of wire necessary. Wooden panels with multiple drilled holes like those on surviving British safes and pictured in contemporary prints were an alternative. Decoratively punched tin panels became popular by 1830.

The overall design of food safes also varied. Many safes stood on integral legs, while some were boxlike structures with separate frames like the "Safe and Stand" in the 1705 probate inventory of York County planter Thomas Collier. Others lacked stands or legs of any sort. In 1719, Samuel Cornwall of Surry County owned both a "Standing safe" and a "hangin Safe," the latter probably suspended from ceiling joists to protect the contents from rodents. The worn tops on some shorter safes, including this one, suggests they doubled as work surfaces.

CWF's safe was skillfully made. Surfaces both inside and out are smoothly dressed, and the frame is neatly secured with pinned mortise-and-tenon joinery. Large wrought nails hold the battened top boards and horizontal backboards in place, while the half-lapped door frame has a single pin and four evenly spaced wrought nails at each corner. Heavy-duty construction is also found on the door stile, which is mitered at the top and bottom, fitted into corresponding lap joints on the rails, and further secured with pins and nails. Each of the iron butterfly hinges is secured with ten nails.

For additional structural integrity, the legs and rails of this safe were made of ash, a dense hardwood also well suited for turning, while the door frame, back, and top boards were made of yellow pine. Oak was another common choice among early southern craftsmen, as evidenced by the "oak safe" owned by Leroy Griffen of Richmond County in 1750. Like the stretcher-based example produced on the Eastern Shore of Virginia in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century (CWF accession 1981-171) most southern food safes were made entirely of plentiful and inexpensive yellow pine.

InscribedNone
MarkingsNone
ProvenanceThe safe was reportedly discovered in a church near the Virginia-North Carolina border early in this century. South Hill, Va., antiques dealer Bessie Brockwell sold it to Frank Horton in the 1940s. Horton later sold the piece to antiques dealer Willis Stallings who then sold it to Wilmington, Del., dealer Charles McClellan. CWF acquired the piece from McClellan in 1953.