TURNED BALUSTER FROM ST.LUKE'S CHURCH CHANCEL RAIL

The surviving physical evidence for furniture made in the South during the seventeenth century is as fragmentary as the elegantly turned baluster from St. Luke’s Church in Isle of Wight County, Virginia. Built around 1680, St. Luke’s Church was later extensively remodeled, and only two fragments of its original interior survive.  In the mid-nineteenth century, a New England antiquarian presented the baluster to the Connecticut Historical Society, and in 1984 the Society generously gave it to MESDA in recognition of Frank Horton’s profound interest in documenting the work of early southern craftsmen. Once part of the chancel screen, an original architectural feature that no longer survives, the baluster is made of white oak and reflects the late mannerist style of a turner who would have produced similar elements for both architecture and furniture in seventeenth-century Virginia.