Storied Past

This book documents two houses built in Odessa, Delaware, dating from 1774 and 1769. A tanner and a merchant constructed them on neighboring lots, and the Historic Odessa Foundation now looks after them. Most of the furnishings in them are original to the houses or were made locally, and the collections have been studied closely over several years.

Philip D. Zimmerman drew on archival papers and family genealogy to bring to light many objects that have never been published. One hundred of them appear here, accompanied by four chapters of interpretation. Few historic sites have been examined this thoroughly, and many of the newly published pieces can be linked to better-known examples in the wider world of decorative and fine arts.

The focus is on the Corbit and Wilson families and their everyday lives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, along with what their possessions reveal about Odessa and the surrounding region. The collection includes strong holdings of furniture by the cabinetmaker John Janvier and his sons and nephew, which the book sets beside work from Delaware, Philadelphia, and other centers. Needlework and other textiles made by Corbit and Wilson women are also covered. Some objects carry labels added by their nineteenth-century owners, which show how collecting and historic preservation developed over time.

The Wilson house opened in 1923 as the first historic house museum in Delaware. The Corbit house stayed in family hands until H. Rodney Sharp bought it in 1938 in order to preserve it. Furniture from the Janvier family was added in the 1970s, and the Foundation has kept acquiring Corbit and Wilson family pieces and locally made furniture since then. The book includes more than 200 photographs, many of them close-up details and historic images, together with physical descriptions and historical documentation. It will appeal to people interested in historic houses and life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to American antique collectors, especially of furniture, and to readers with ties to the area.