Furniture and Clothing

Written by Brandon Stephens

The personal possessions, furnishings, and other items in a person’s home helps to define them. Objects, paradoxically, help to define a person and in the case of under-documented individuals like the enslaved, interpreting these objects can serve as a valuable tool for humanizing these individuals. 

A bed and bedding would almost certainly be included among Christian David’s furnishings, an example is held by the Old Salem collection. Beds, along with numerous other types of furniture and crafts, were made by joiners in the Salem community for local use and export and would have been readily available. Given the small size of Christian David’s dwelling, it is probable it would have been primarily used for sleeping, and a large object like a bed would have dominated the space physically and functionally. Bedding materials such as blankets and pillows are well-attested in the area, and today Old Salem includes numerous reproductions of bedding materials in buildings and homes across the site that could be used as reference for our own reproduction. Other furniture likely occupied the building; a table for working, eating, or storing things, and a stool for sitting. Both were again produced in large quantities locally from poplar and would have been available and affordable. These furnishings are similar in substance (if not style) to those used by the majority of museum visitors today, and provide a valuable bridge between past and present.

Two further furnishings would have been essential in any dwelling in Salem. First would have been a lighting source for reading or working after sunset and was especially important in structures and rooms like Christian David’s which may have lacked windows for lighting. Candles and candleholders would have been commonplace, as would have been oil lamps.  Lamps ranged from simple pots with a single wick to ornate and highly decorated examples, though Christian David, as an enslaved person, may only be assumed to have had a simple tin version with one or two wicks. 

Finally, David would have needed a place to perform that most essential of human functions. Outhouses were in use in Salem (though strictly regulated) though no evidence appears to suggest something similar was located at Lot 7. Evidence instead points to the use of a ceramic chamber pot. These were in use across the town in a variety of materials and styles. Given David’s possible physical infirmity and their wide availability, coupled with a ready supply of water on-site for cleaning and ceramic archaeological remains which may have been used for such a chamber pot, it seems likely David used one of these objects. 

Christian David likely possessed other personal objects. Chief among these would have been a hat or hats, a ubiquitous clothing item worn by men of all classes and statuses in early 19th-century America. For work and day-to-day wear, a round straw hat decorated by a hat band would most likely have been worn by David.9 Contemporary art presents men, including African Americans, wearing such hats, and they would have been available in sufficient quantities for those working outdoors to have easily obtained them. A respected and important member and official, or Saaldiener, of the Moravian church, it is probable David owned a finer felt hat for use on Sundays and for church business.10 Like those worn by other church members on such occasions, David’s hat would have been of black wool felt decorated with a contrasting hat band and lined with canvas, linen, or another material to prevent the felt from irritating the wearer’s skin and to protect the felt from sweat. Hat bands may have been decorated or plain, and a wearer like David may have purposefully or accidentally creased the top of his hats, thus personalizing each of these objects. 

Salem was a major manufacturing center of clay pipes during Christian David’s life, and smoking was a habit of a significant number of residents in Salem. David’s pipe may have featured a simply decorated bowl, but like other local pipes would have had a detachable stem fashioned from a reed or length of cane cut from a nearby pond or creek bank.11 Pipes, then as now, were often carried around by smokers and handled frequently. In the case of Christian David, a direct piece of evidence exists for his pipe smoking, as pipe fragments were located at the site of his home during archaeological excavations in 1977. 

One’s personal effects contribute to or express their identity. Despite little in the way of direct evidence remaining for Christian David’s life, with the invaluable help of interpreters and curators at Old Salem Museum and Gardens, it is possible to hypothesize what these objects Christian David possessed, which allows us to connect with David and imagine his everyday life, even if it is quite foreign to our own.