Thomas Elfe Thomas Elfe Elfe was born in 1719 in London, England. He was an accomplished and prolific furniture and cabinet craftsman of the American colonial period. Elfe, a contemporary of Thomas Chippendale, was considered Charleston's best furniture craftsman of the eighteenth century. His working career spanned almost thirty years from about 1746 to 1775. At one point in his career his personal worth was a fortune of over 6,200 English pounds. Local Charleston historian and one time director of the Charleston Museum, E. Milby Burton (1889–1977), attributed Elfe as the craftsman of some of the finest nationally acclaimed furniture produced. Burton's
Cabriole leg in about the year 1750 with the advent of Chippendale furniture design; while Chippendale chairs adopted the cabriole leg, the leg design became more delicate than those of the Queen Anne Style. American designs arose by the mid-18th century, imitating the English Queen Anne Style and borrowing elements from all three sub-periods of its development in England: Queen Anne period (1702–1714), George I period (1714–1727) and George II period (1727–1760). To demonstrate the central role of the cabriole leg in this period of American furniture, this period "has frequently been called the cabriole period, and this is no misnomer, since