1990s King-Size Reproduction of Four-Poster Bed by Thomas Day – No Veneer – Craftique Brand

An American Empire or Federal style King-size bed with four posts in the manner of North Carolina cabinetmaker Thomas Day. This bed was produced by Craftique in the late 1990s and was part of their Heritage Collection.

Measures: “87 wide x 88 1/2″ long x 74 3/4” high

This was in a guest room & I am downsizing / retired. There are minor scuffs along the top of both siderails (see photo w/blue circle) – I have not attempted to fix them in case I do something wrong.

About Thomas Day:
North Carolina’s most in-demand, pre-Civil War, master cabinetmaker, Thomas Day, had everything it took to be Southern royalty – land, money, education, and a thriving business. Yet, Day was a black man. Born in a Community of free African-Americans in southern Virginia, Day achieved such fame that his customers created a double meaning for the term “daybed,” a convenient play on his name. His story is as striking as his unique creations, marked by his very own “Exuberant Style.”

Born free in Virginia in 1801, Day walked a precarious line all his life. Despite laws limiting the rights of free blacks, he established a successful business in North Carolina, owned stock in a local bank, trained white apprentices (and owned black slaves, himself), and numbered among his customers North Carolina’s most prominent citizens, including the Governor, David S. Reid.

Today, worshipers at the Milton Presbyterian Church, a snug brick building that dates to 1837, still sit in pews designed and constructed by Day, who according to local legend donated them on the condition that he and his family be allowed to sit downstairs with the white parishioners.

In 1830, when he married a free black woman from Virginia, the North Carolina General Assembly voted to make an exception to its law that barred free blacks from taking up residence in the state. She joined Day in Milton, a small town on the Virginia line, and they had three children, who went to school in Wilbraham, Mass.

In 1848, Day purchased the Union Tavern, a Federal-style building erected in 1815, and converted the upstairs into a living space and the downstairs into a showroom, with a workshop out back. Though Day drew inspiration in his cabinetry from contemporary pattern books, his work has a distinct personality that scholars have learned to recognize, even in unsigned pieces. Often massive in scale and decorated with exaggerated ”s” curves, bulbous turnings and exuberant cutouts, Day’s wardrobes, sideboards, beds, chairs and secretaries have a forthright dignity that is hard to ignore. Day’s architectural carvings, especially his sinuous newel posts and ornamental mantels, border on folk sculpture. The most famous mantel, in a home near Milton, is decorated with two frowning mahogany faces.

By the late 1850s, however, increasingly restrictive legislation on the activities of blacks in the state, combined with a national financial panic, undermined Day’s business. He died bankrupt in 1860-1861, though a son of his followed him into the cabinetry business.