“Patty + Mr. Peter is to Make a Match”–An Endangered Wedding Artifact and Why You Should Vote for It

Just as fine luggage today bears its designer’s mark, like the Louis Vuitton “LV” or repeating C’s of Coach’s logo, Jesse Sharples branded his late 18th-century goods. His label prominently appears when the trunk lid is lifted.

In the 1780s, Jesse Sharples sold riding equipment and horse husbandry tools. He later augmented his American-made inventory with English luxury imports like silver and silver-plate bridles and silver-mounted whips, to attract an elite clientele. The wedding trunk is one of three known examples of Sharples’ work preserved today; two smaller ones belong to the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library and Historic New England.

Sharples appears to have been one of several saddlers to outfit George Washington, who traveled often for work and war. The documentary record reveals a variety of trunks and uses. For example, a June 1781 inventory of articles left to the then-General’s recording secretary, Richard Varick, included “4 Black Leather Campaign Trunks with Leather Straps.” In 1780, Washington penned instructions to pack winter blankets into a small, black leather trunk (labeled with a brass plaque engraved, “Genl. Washington No. 4”); when that piece later entered the collection of Historic Mount Vernon, it held fragments of clothing worn by George and Martha, as well as a pair of George’s dentures.

Another wedding gift: Washington is said to have given this English pocket watch to Martha Peter’s mother, Eleanor Calvert Custis, when she married his stepson.
TUDOR PLACE COLLECTION. Gift of the Magruder family, 2012.7001.

Washington often purchased personal items and household goods from Europe, like the English-made pocket watch recently donated to Tudor Place. But through commissions like this trunk, he also encouraged domestic industry, particularly in the growing manufacturing center of Philadelphia.

Sharples’s shop thrived there in the early 1790s, as its advertising indicates. The master published calls for journeymen laborers eight times from 1792 to 1794. One ad in The Federal Gazette boasted, “40 to 50 journeymen in different branches will find constant employment.” Sharples also broadcast assurances of potential customers’ satisfaction, as in this 1789 notice:

He and his workers would have needed to know which leathers suited what purpose. Animal hides came from a variety of animals and, depending on how they were tanned, the leather could have different textures, colors and degrees of flexibility. An apprentice, several of whom Sharples also employed, needed years of handling experience to train their touch, according to Colonial Williamsburg saddle and harness maker Jim Kladder.

Tacks in an ornamental pattern anchored (now missing or torn) leather packing straps.

The Tudor Place wedding trunk is made of sawn pine boards, with an interior lining of plain-woven linen. Its exterior was clad in durable water-resistant leather, now peeling, and its outer edges and joints were reinforced with sheet iron plates and leather straps. Four additional straps could secure it during coach or boat transit. Originally, a wide leather skirt provided extra weatherproofing for the joint between lid and frame (and covered the lock and hasp), but it has been lost.

The wedding trunk’s leather cladding has peeled away in places, exposing the wood beneath.

Perhaps the trunk’s most notable use was for the January 1795 society wedding of Martha Parke Custis, known as “Patty,” to Thomas Peter. First Lady Martha Washington, Patty’s grandmother, happily anticipated the nuptials in a letter to her niece:

[F]rom what I can hear Patty and Mr. Peter is to make a match – the old gentleman [Robert Peter] will comply with Dr. Stuart’s bargain and in the last letter I had from Mrs. Stuart she says Patty had given him leve (sic) to visit her as a lover.

“Mrs. Stuart” was Martha Custis’s mother, Eleanor Calvert Custis, Martha Washington’s daughter-in-law. “Dr. Stuart” was the widowed Eleanor’s second husband. (For more on Custis-Peter genealogy, see the biographical essay by Tudor Place Archivist Wendy Kail.) The groom’s father, Robert Peter, was a wealthy Georgetown tobacco merchant and landowner who had served as Georgetown’s first mayor.

The District of Columbia was still brand new then (established 1791) and the presidency based in Philadelphia, but neighboring Georgetown was a prosperous port. It was from Philadelphia that Mrs. Washington shipped her gift of trousseau items to her granddaughter. The President bestowed on the bride (at her request) a portrait of himself in miniature now in the Tudor Place collection, one of the few existing Washington portraits painted from life.

The bride asked for her step-grandfather’s likeness as a gift. He commissioned this miniature by Walter Robertson. TUDOR PLACE COLLECTION. acc. no. 6186.

The wedding took place on January 6 — George and Martha Washington’s 36th wedding anniversary — at Hope Park estate in Fairfax County, Virginia. Ten months later, Nelly described the newlyweds’ bliss in a letter to a friend:

[M]y Sister Peter expects a little one, in a few months … She is now settled in the Federal City very charmingly—her husband the best and most affectionate. She is perfectly happy.