Thomas Day

Thomas Day (1801–1861) was an American furniture craftsman and cabinetmaker in Milton, Caswell County, North Carolina. Born into a free Black family in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Day moved to Milton in 1817 and became a highly successful businessman, boasting the largest and most productive workshop in the state during the 1850s. Day catered to upper-class white clientele and was respected among his peers for his craftsmanship and work ethic. Day came from a relatively well-off family and was privately educated. Today, Day's pieces are highly sought after and sell for high prices; his work has been heavily studied and displayed in museums such as the North Carolina Museum of History. Day is celebrated as a highly skilled craftsman and savvy businessman, specifically in regards to the challenges his race posed to his success in the Antebellum South. Education and personal life In 1801, Day was born into a free Black family in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. According to John Day Jr., Thomas Day's older brother, Day's father was the grandson of a white plantation mistress from South Carolina. Day's maternal grandparents, the Stewarts, were also free Blacks of wealth and status in Virginia; they owned a slave-worked plantation and Day's grandfather was a doctor. Day's father John Day Sr. was a cabinetmaker of relatively high status as well – he could vote, and was possibly Quaker educated in a time when private education was difficult to attain as a free Black person. Day's proclivity for cabinetmaking and crafting stemmed from his father's career as a cabinetmaker. Day and his older brother were privately educated. They were sent to board with white families to whom their father was connected through his cabinet and farming businesses, and went to school with the white children; thus Day received a caliber of education similar to that of his white contemporaries. Although he was a fairly successful cabinetmaker, John Day Sr. often found himself in debt due to alcoholism and gambling, and he moved the family around often to find business in order to earn an income. This problem brought the Day family to North Carolina in 1817, where John went to work for Thomas Reynolds, a furniture craftsman, to pay off his debts, including that from the migration bond imposed on incoming free Blacks by the state of North Carolina. It is around this time that John Day Jr.