In examining the furniture and utensils in the different rooms in the dwelling-house of the average planter of the seventeenth century, it will be found that no effort was made to preserve a distinct character for each apartment. With the exception of the kitchen, there was hardly a room in the building which did not contain a bed, a fact that was due either to the size of the families at that period, or to the hospitable spirit of the landowners. In the hall, where the meals were taken, there were frequently placed flock-beds, linen chests, smoothing-irons, guns, pistols, powder-horns, and cutlasses, swords, drums, saddles, and bridles. In the parlor, which was the term applied to the apartment used as a sitting-room by the family as well as a reception-room for the guests, there were large feather-beds and truckle-beds, and also chests filled with the most valuable clothing and the finest table and bed linen. In the chamber, every variety of article in use in the household was stored, while the dairy, in addition to the ordinary utensils of the milk-house, contained masses of old and new pewter for repairing flagons, porringers, stills, chamber-pots, tankards, and fish-kettles. Powdering-tubs, chests, rum-casks, stillyards, spinning-wheels, raw hides, and sides of tanned leather were enumerated as a part of the contents of the “poultry.”
It will be interesting, as showing the division of the household articles among the different apartments of a dwelling, as well as throwing light on the character of these articles, to give in detail the items in the inventory of a planter whose estate was fairly representative of the average. I shall take the home of Thomas Osborne of Henrico, who died in the last decade of the century, leaving a personalty calculated to be worth one hundred and twenty-five pounds sterling, which, according to the
