Thomas Day (North Carolina)

Thomas Day (1801-1861) was a free black furniture craftsman and cabinetmaker in Milton, Caswell County, North Carolina. Born a free black man 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 high-class white clientele and was respected among his white peers for his craftsmanship and work ethic. Day came from a free and 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 heralded in modern society as an incredibly skilled craftsman and savvy businessman, specifically in regards to the challenges his race posed to his success in the Antebellum South.

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. Day’s proclivity for cabinetmaking and crafting stemmed from his father’s career as a cabinetmaker. Day and his older brother were privately educated, a rarity for free black persons. 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.

John Day, Sr., although he was a fairly successful cabinetmaker, 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., and Thomas Day begin their own cabinet shop in order to earn their own income, moving to Milton to establish their furniture business. After some time working in North Carolina, John Day, Jr. left the furniture business to pursue ministry, moving back to Virginia with his own family, where he owned a home and a few slaves. After a schism with the Baptist church there, he migrated to Liberia where he helped found the colony itself, set up its government, and was a missionary.

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