From Forest to Foyer: Rhode Island and Mahogany in the 18th Century
This exhibition is based on Jennifer L. Anderson’s Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America (2012).
The RIHS would like to thank Dr. Anderson for her collaboration.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The rise of mahogany as a commodity in the 1700s paralleled and contributed to the rise of mercantile Rhode Island in the global economy.
Mahogany was prized for its strength, density, color, and figured grains. It was once available in colonial America only with great cost and human effort. Imported from rainforests thousands of miles away, this precious wood first was used by the wealthy elite for their elegant homes. By 1750, it had become the most popular material for fine furniture and increasingly accessible to ordinary people. At the forefront of this trend were Rhode Islanders like the Card brothers (James and Jonathan), who participated in every facet of the mahogany trade.
Transforming enormous mahogany trees into beautiful objects to grace the parlors of American homes involved major capital investments, extensive deforestation, and a complex labor system. Its participants were enslaved woodcutters in Central America and the Caribbean, sailors and sea captains on the high seas, influential merchants, skilled cabinetmakers, and eager furniture buyers throughout the Atlantic world.
The word “mahogany” is likely derived from the Yoruban (West African) word M’Oganwo, as enslaved workers thought it resembled an African tree. Mahogany bark was used medicinally by the Indigenous peoples of Central America and the Caribbean for fevers and as a laxative.
According to Jennifer Anderson (Mahogany, p. 222), “During his travels, [the naturalist Mark] Catesby documented many botanical marvels for the first time, but he also observed that some of the most useful trees and plants were already ‘much exhausted.’ While he did not specifically mention mahogany among these early casualties of overharvesting, he noted that its excellence ‘for all Domestik Uses is now sufficiently known in England’ and that in the Bahamas and elsewhere it was preferred for shipbuilding, surpassing ‘Oak and all other Wood, viz. Durableness, resisting Gunshots, and burying the Shot without Splintering.’ For these very reasons, in fact, the trees already were disappearing from the Bahamas at an alarming rate.”