literally a board, and was called a table-board, and the linen
cover used at meals was not called a tablecloth, but a board-cloth or
board-clothes.

As smoothly sawed and finished boards were not so plentiful at first in
the colonies as might naturally be thought when we remember the vast
encircling forests, all such boards were carefully treasured, and used
many times to avoid sawing others by the tedious and wearying process of
pit-sawing. Hence portions of packing-boxes, or chests which had carried
stores from England to the colonies, were made into table-boards. One
such oaken table-board, still in existence, has on the under side in
quaint lettering the name and address of the Boston settler to whom the
original packing-box was sent in 1638.

The old-time board-cloth was in no way inferior in quality or whiteness
to our present table-linen; for we know how proud colonial wives and
daughters were of the linen of their own spinning, weaving, and
bleaching. The linen tablecloth was either of holland, huckaback,
dowlas, osnaburg, or lockram--all heavy and comparatively coarse
materials--or of fine damask, just as to-day; some of the handsome
board-cloths were even trimmed with lace.

The colonists had plenty of napkins; more, as a rule, than families of
corresponding means and station own to-day. They had need of them, for
when America was first settled forks were almost unknown to English
people--being used for eating in luxurious Italy alone, where travellers
having seen and found them useful and cleanly, afterwards introduced
them into England. So hands had to be constantly employed for holding
food, instead of the forks we now use, and napkins were therefore as
constantly necessary. The first fork brought to America was for Governor
John Winthrop, in Boston, in 1633, and it was in a leather case with a
knife and a bodkin. If the governor ate with a fork at the table, he
was doubtless the only person in the colony who did so. Thirty or forty
years later a few two-tined iron and silver forks were brought across
the water, and used in New York and Virginia, as well as Massachusetts;
and by the end of the century they had come into scant use at the tables
of persons of wealth and fashion. The first mention of a fork in
Virginia is in an inventory dated 1677; this was of a single fork. The
salt-cellar, or saler, as it was first called, was the centrepiece of
the table--"Sett in the myddys of the tabull," says an old