PARLOR

Frank Horton’s principled collection policies limited the availability of period rooms for the museum. When MESDA’s collection required an architectural interior that could not be salvaged from an inevitably lost house, Horton proposed the installation of a reconstructed interior, an option that gave the collection an important architectural object without the demolition of a building.

The reproduction by MESDA of the 1769 Humphrey Sommers Parlor resulted in one of the most important recent architectural studies of eighteenth-century Charleston architecture. While studying the carving of the original Sommers parlor and many of its Charleston contemporaries, MESDA staff member John Bivins recognized the hand of its as yet unnamed master carver and was able to assemble a catalog of work by the same hand. Had the room simply been removed from the house—never considered as an option—such discoveries would not have occurred and Charleston would have been deprived of another of its finest interiors.