STRETCHER TABLE

The South Carolina-made stretcher table acquired by MESDA in 2000 was created between 1690 and 1720 and is the earliest known example of southern-made mahogany furniture. Indicative of the extremely high quality lumber exported from the Caribbean at the turn of the eighteenth century, the table’s top is a single, massive board of Cuban mahogany that measures more than 66 by 36 inches. The table descended in the Broughton family of Mulberry Plantation, a magnificent, baroque-style mansion overlooking the western branch of the Cooper River, approximately fourteen miles outside Charleston, and may be the “1 Large Mahogany Table” listed in Thomas Broughton II’s probate inventory, dated February 10, 1752.

The Broughton family table presents an intriguing mystery. In the eighteenth century, the stretcher table form was used most frequently for kitchen, tavern, and work-related tables, and generally were made from pine or less expensive hard woods, not an expensive, imported wood such as mahogany. In addition to utilitarian purposes, however, the stretcher form was also used for communion tables in churches. The Broughton table might in fact be a rare survival of the original altar furniture from St. John’s Parish, Berkeley. Founded in 1706, the church building was abandoned during both the American Revolution and the Civil War, and destroyed around 1890. The Broughtons were among St. John’s most prominent families. In 1820, the Reverend Frederick Dalcho (1770-1836) recalled that when the church was originally constructed Colonel Thomas Broughton (c. 1668-1737) “very generously adorned” its interior and “made a Communion Table.”  The communion table may have been saved from fire and warfare by residing at the Broughton family’s plantation, where furniture scholars discovered it in the early-twentieth century.