Allie Burton, worked 1796

Occupation

Location

Biography

In 1965 Eleanore Monahon published an article on Rhode Island furniture that she attributed to a Warren, Rhode Island, cabinetmaker she identified as Allie Burton on the basis of the history of a card table provided by the family which owned it.(1) When Thomas Michie published a closely related table in the 1986 catalogue of the furniture collection at the Rhode Island School of Design, he wrote that no cabinetmaker with this name could be found in Rhode Island records.(2) The extensive research in town records conducted by the Rhode Island Furniture Archive also turned up no evidence of this individual. There was, however, a cabinetmaker named James Halyburton (Haliburton) known through newspaper advertisements to work in Warren in the late 1790s. Presumably in the family’s oral tradition Haliburton became Allie Burton.

Patricia E. Kane

Eleanore Monahon, "Providence Cabinetmakers of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," Antiques (May 1965), vol 87, p. 575.

Christopher P. Monkhouse and Thomas S. Michie, American Furniture in Pendleton House (Providence, R.I.: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1986), p. 141.