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Serving Silently: Jefferson's Dumbwaiters
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Informality and efficiency ruled the day at Jefferson's "half Virginian, half French style" feasts.[1] Unusual in America, dumbwaiters were common in England and France: Jefferson used five dumbwaiters of unknown form during his stay in Paris between 1784 and 1789. These small, freestanding tables with several shelves, placed by dinner guests, held some of the food, dishes, and silver needed for a meal. They allowed for more informal dining and were often used for small, intimate dinner parties. Jefferson's French dumbwaiters were too poor in condition to warrant inclusion in any of the 86 crates of furniture, decorative arts, and books that he shipped from France back to America. In Philadelphia, Jefferson purchased at least four dumbwaiters during his tenure as Secretary of State, and visitors during Jefferson's presidency commented on their use in the President's House. Margaret Bayard Smith wrote:
When he had any persons dining with him, with whom he wished to enjoy a free and unrestricted flow of conversation, the number of persons at table never exceed four, and by each individual was placed a dumb-waiter, containing everything necessary for the progress of the dinner from beginning to end, so as to make the attendance of servants entirely unnecessary, believing as he did, that much of the domestic and even public discord was produced by the mutilated and misconstructed repetition of free conversation at dinner tables, by these mute but not inattentive listeners.[2]
Jefferson's dinner parties became known for their pêle-mêle style in which visitors sat without regard to rank, and the presentation of food was no less unusual. By employing dumbwaiters, Jefferson reduced the number of servants or slaves required to serve the meal (customarily one servant per diner), but more than that, these dinners provided a mechanism for conversation among powerful political elites. Jefferson recorded the outcomes of his dinners by tracking the actions of legislators after they had personally learned of Jefferson's stance on a subject.[3]
At Monticello, Jefferson adapted other devices to reduce the presence of enslaved servants at dinner. The revolving serving door, located in a recess of the dining room near the stairs that led to the kitchen, allowed servants to remove empty serving dishes from the first course and to place foods for the second course, on the shelves and rotate the door into the dining room. Stationed in the dining room, one or more servants or family members could transfer the food from the serving door shelves to the table. Jefferson also installed wine elevators on either side of the fireplace that led directly to the wine cellar.
The construction of two of the five extant dumbwaiters is attributed to the Monticello joinery, possibly made by John Hemmings, the enslaved head joiner. This walnut dumbwaiter bears the characteristic simplicity of decoration similar to other known joinery pieces, including a double scratch bead on the open end of the shelves. The dumbwaiter has straight, tapering legs and astragal-molded side rails.[4] This dumbwaiter was made for use at Jefferson's retreat, Poplar Forest, in Bedford County, Virginia.
Linda Retallack
September 2003
Sources:
- Daniel Webster in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., Visitors to Monticello (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 99.
- Margaret Bayard Smith, “President’s House Forty Years Ago,” 1841.
- Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 2000), 25.
- Robert L. Self and Susan R. Stein, “The Collaboration of Thomas Jefferson and John Hemings: Furniture Attributed to the Monticello Joinery,” in Winterthur Portfolio 33:4, 238.