Printable View
If you are anywhere near the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and have an interest in the history of furniture, you may want to check this out:
http://www.winchesterstar.com/pages/view/seat.html
The Museum of the Shenandoah Valley is installing an interesting study of the 19th century chair. They will display dozens of chairs made in the Valley. Not everyone's cup of tea, but it should fascinate some.
I just realized that not everyone can see that link for free. You can check out the basics here:
http://www.shenandoahmuseum.org/cale...p?group_id=143
You can PM me if you would like to read the full article.
Even though much of my business is now leather furniture, my store was founded on doing historical reproductions and I really enjoy historical furniture. I can spend hours on end at The Met in NYC looking at all the Goddard-Townsend pieces in the forgotten back end of the museum and marveling at the craftsmanship involved to make them.
The history of the USA as a country can be traced by the evolution of the common chair. Up until the late 1600's only the wealthy and royalty could afford a luxury of a chair in the home and it was America that really got the ball rolling with the invention of the Windsor chair in the early 1700's. One can tell what part of the country and approximate time it was made from the designs of the early chairs....I could write pages and pages of comments and text on that subject, its a fascinating topic for anyone remotely interested in American history.
Here's just a little tidbit:
The American Windsor was the first common man's chair and the strongest wood chair ever made. They were $ 5 each when new in the mid to late 1700's. They were always painted green and sometimes called "green chairs". Never stained in a natural finish, because they used three different woods in construction and the stains of the day would not take evenly on the chair. They were utility chairs and used daily with no special care given to them. At the height of popularity, there were (5) chair operations in New York City that built the majority of them, and this was back in day when there was no machinery - everything was done by hand including sawing the boards from the trees in a 'saw pit'. The largest of these late 1700's operations could turn out 220 chairs per week.
Fast forward to 2009. Of the current reproduction chair makers, no one has the capacity to build better than DR Dimes & Co. in New Hampshire. Even with modern high speed machinery, laser cutters an CNC machines they cannot put out 220 chairs per week!
Around 1800, the green chairs were looking a little tired, they had been used for 20 - 30 - 40 years and the paint was beat up. The fashion at the turn of the century was to paint these old green windsors White, Yellow, Blue, Red in any bright color. That lasted until about 1830, when American Windsors were 'retired' as out of fashion and new machinery started coming into play to make factory chairs of other styles.
So, if you ever see an ORIGINAL green-painted American Windsor chair (there are few survivors), it is worth several thousands dollars. Even one that has old white paint with green underneath is quite valuable. Unfortunately many of these old original paint chairs were stripped of their old paint in the 1950's , 60's and early 70s' and now worth only a fraction of the price they would bring has the old paint not been removed.
I've done many reproductions for several historic properties around the country over the past 25 years, including The Smithsonian, Pequot Indian Museum, Carlyle House, Independence Hall , Mt. Vernon Estate, Carlyle House, Gadsby's Tavern, Gunston Hall and several other historical projects. I can talk for hours on American chairs !
And ya'll thought I was all about leather furniture <G>
I knew this could be of interest to you, Duane. I'll email you a copy of the first article.
Were all of the original green chairs pretty much the same color? If so, do you have a picture of this green? I've been fascinated by personal choices of the populous, like color trends, particularly before mass marketing started to take hold many decades ago.
I don't have a photo of an original one handy, but in 250 years if you were to see an original chair the color will have faded and darkened to about what it is on the background of our forum. That's what most folks think the old one started out as. Not true! Its age and dirt that took away the original color.
When the chairs were originally painted in the 1700's they were bright green, I call it 'traffic light green'. On one of our museum projects they very carefully peeled the paint apart on their original chair and got the original color to us, so we did the whole project in this bright green. It was a shocker!
Our forefathers did not use muted colors back in the day. Paint was expensive, and kept under lock and key in most places. The thought of that day was if you could afford paint, make it bright so everyone could see it. And they did!