55th Annual Delaware Show

He taught woodworking skills to his son, Nathaniel V, who, from 1787 onward, worked as a house carpenter, millwright, wheelwright, surveyor, and cooper. Felix learned the fundamentals of clockmaking and watch repair from Nathaniel IV and gained additional experience in the shop of a New York City watchmaker and repairer in the years 1815 to 1817. The Dominy family lived near the center of East Hampton village and owned and cultivated 100 acres of farmland scattered throughout the township. About 1715 they moved into a new house apparently built around the core of an earlier structure on the property that had a parlor below a second-floor chamber and a lean-to kitchen. Between 1745 and 1760, Nathaniel III doubled the size of the house with a two-story addition across the front. He also extended the lean-to, adding a woodworking shop of 485 square feet. Faithfully reconstructed at Winterthur, the shop is equipped with the original workbenches, shelves, racks, and other fixtures in the same positions that the Dominy craftsmen installed them, including a great wheel lathe, the only known eighteenth-century example (fig. 4), and a pole lathe, each probably made between 1750 and 1800. As itemized in their accounts, the craftsmen made more than 1,700 objects in the woodworking shop with tools forged primarily in England and purchased in New York City through East Hampton merchants who sailed weekly to Manhattan (fig. 5). Fig. 4. The great wheel lathe probably made by Nathaniel Dominy IV between 1775 and 1800, shown in the Dominy Gallery. Fig. 5. Desk-and-bookcase make by Nathaniel Dominy V for John Lyon Gardiner, 1800. Maple, cherry, white pine. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Special Fund for Collection Objects 1992.66 — 117 —

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