Everything in Its Right Place: A Savannah Family’s Silver Chest

Steven Baltsas, WPAMC ’25

I’m not one to turn down the chance to visit a maritime museum, especially if it’s hosted in a spellbinding Greek Revival mansion. With a narrow window of time in Savannah, I dashed to the Ships of the Sea Maritime Museum, whose collection is spread throughout the 1819 house of William Scarbrough (Fig. 1). Built just as Scarbrough’s investment in an early steamship came to fruition, British architect William Jay is responsible for its ambitious design.¹ The SS Savannah successfully made its transatlantic voyage from Savannah to Liverpool in May–June 1819. As a merchant vessel and passenger ship, it conveyed both cotton and the intrepid capitalists who reaped its profits to England at rapid speed.²

After getting a sense of the house’s bones, I wound up in the empty basement. Here, I spotted a large chest. An overscaled, weighty sort of chest that would land on a cartoon character’s head. A more flattering comparison might be a treasure chest, in this case for the meticulous storage of silver. Consisting of several green velvet-lined trays cut to correspond with a full silver service, it could pack away scores of precious objects (Figs. 2, 3). Appropriate for a maritime museum, but even more apt—the silver chest belonged to Scarbrough’s daughter, Julia Henrietta. She wed Godfrey Barnsley, a Liverpool cotton factor, who likely commissioned it for them. 

The felt cavities throughout the chest whisper of the Barnselys’ unchecked affluence. A deep pit suggests a pitcher; a shallow divot, perhaps a butter knife. After being guided through the Telfair Museums’s Shattered Illusions: Reconsidering Glassware through the Lens of Care by its curator, Ahmauri Williams-Alford, I thought of how mind-numbing loading up the silver chest must have been. Enslaved and/or free laborers of the Barnselys could have spent hours or even days polishing the myriad silver pieces. Similar to the whimsical Bohemian glass kerosene lamps in Shattered Illusions, as Williams-Alford explained, stewards of these objects were always one mistake away from punishment.³ In the case of the silver chest, they not only exhibited care in their diligent packing skills, but also in their expert polishing. A successful packing would act as a kind of teleportation, moving the sparkling silver from one house to another with erasure of the task itself.

Sometime in the 1840s or 50s, the chest traveled from Savannah to Cherokee-occupied lands (now Bartow County, Georgia) where Barnsley was building an Italianate plantation house, Woodlands. Following the Civil War and more misfortunes, including a tornado that destroyed the house, the silver vanished in a sale to reverse debts. The chest became a casket for all the stories associated with it.⁴

1. Mills Lane, Architecture of the Old South: Greek Revival & Romantic (Savannah: The Beehive Press, 1996), 19. ↩︎
2. Frank O. Braynard, S.S. Savannah: The Elegant Steam Ship (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1963), 72. ↩︎
3. For newspaper ad transcriptions associated with the exhibition, see “Shattered Illusions: Reconsidering Glassware through the Lens of Care,” Telfair Museums, accessed September 4, 2024,  https://www.telfair.org/exhibitions/shattered-illusions/. ↩︎
4. According to the museum label, the silver was sold “to pay for debts incurred during the [Civil] war.” ↩︎