Now I Sit Me Down (12 page)

The Stick Chair

Washington had another unusual chair in his study. The chair at his writing desk was fitted with an overhead pasteboard fan that swung back and forth like an Indian punkah, the power being supplied by the sitter using a foot treadle. The inventor of the “Fan Chair” was John Cram, a Philadelphia musical instrument maker, who had built the first one in 1786 for the artist Charles Willson Peale and later made one for Benjamin Franklin. Cram built the support frame and the treadle mechanism; the chair itself was an ordinary Windsor, the most common chair of that time.

The Windsor chair is an English invention. The key to its ingenious design is the seat, a thick slab of solid hardwood, carved with two shallow, saddle-shaped depressions to provide sitting comfort. The back hoop is a single piece of wood, steam-heated and bent into shape. The hoop is simply countersunk into the seat, as are the turned spindles and splayed legs—no complicated joinery or hardware is required. Although there are rare examples of mahogany chairs, English Windsors were generally made of a combination of commonplace woods: hard elm for the seat, dense beech for the turnings, and malleable ash or yew for the hoop. Windsor chairs were inexpensive—an unpainted chair sold for a few shillings, compared with more than a pound for a Chippendale-style mahogany side chair. They were used in taverns and public houses, and in the homes of ordinary country people; in wealthier households they served as outdoor furniture.

The Windsor chair originated in the late seventeenth century in Buckinghamshire, whose extensive beechwood forests provided a ready supply of material for the turnings. There is a charming story that George II came across the chair while sheltering from the rain in a cottage and found it so comfortable that he ordered several for Windsor Castle, which gave the chair its name. Unfortunately, it is only a story, because there are textual references to “Windsor chairs” years before George II assumed the throne. The name more likely derived either from Windsor Great Forest, whence much of the wood originated, or from the market town of Windsor, which was a clearinghouse for the chairs on their way to London.

Windsor chairs were produced by a cottage industry. Bolgers, who lived in the forest, used pedal-operated pole-lathes to turn the spindles, legs, and stretchers. Bottomers carved the seats, benchmen produced the splats and sawn parts, while polishers smoothed the rough pieces with spokeshaves and sandpaper. Framers assembled the parts, and stainers finished the chair, typically black or green. None of these techniques were particularly novel; they were adapted from the wheelwright's craft, which traditionally steam-bent wood for wheel rims, used lathe-turned spindles for spokes, and drilled holes for socket joints.

English hoop-back Windsor chair

There were two basic types of Windsor chairs: the hoop-back, in which a steam-bent hoop supported the spindles, and the comb-back, in which the spindles themselves supported a carved crest rail. There were many permutations: with arms, with splats, with V-shaped back braces, with a low or a high back, and with straight, turned, or cabriole legs. What all these chairs had in common was that they were light, strong, and comfortable.

The Windsor chair arrived in America very early. Patrick Gordon, who was deputy governor of the Province of Pennsylvania and the Lower Counties on the Delaware, brought five comb-back Windsor chairs with him when he arrived in Philadelphia in 1726. This plain chair must have appealed to the frugal Quakers, for there were soon scores of Windsor chairmakers in the city. The most popular model was the hoop-back, known locally as a sack-back. These so-called Philadelphia chairs were exported to other colonies up and down the eastern seaboard and as far south as the West Indies. It is easy to understand the Windsor chair's appeal: it did not use fancy woods; it did not require wood-carving or upholstering skills; unlike a rush chair the seat never had to be replaced; and an old chair needed only a coat of paint to freshen it up. By mid-century, the Windsor chair was the most popular chair in the colonies. Windsor chairs furnished Philadelphia's Carpenters Hall, where the First Continental Congress met, and the State House, where the Founding Fathers gathered to sign the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
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American Windsor chairs were not produced by a rural cottage industry but in cities, and although some of the production approached the organization of an assembly line, the best were made by individual craftsmen, such as Francis Trumble, Joseph Henzey, and Thomas Gilpin, all of Philadelphia. Some of these men started as cabinetmakers, others specialized in Windsor chairs, and all were skilled craftsmen (often signing their chairs). American makers of Windsor chairs did not—in fact, could not—copy English models, for this humble chair was not included in pattern books. Consequently, they were free to exercise their own ingenuity, and in the process produced chairs that reached a higher level of refinement than their English counterparts. Splats and cabriole legs were done away with, and spindles were made progressively thinner. Comb-backs were given interesting scrolls, and the ends of arms were often carved with knuckles resembling animal paws. Some makers combined the sack-back and the comb-back to make an especially tall chair with a headrest. The lightest, most delicate model was the fan-back armchair, whose tall sloping back was reinforced by two diagonal braces. The prices of these chairs varied: a plain sack-back might cost only a few shillings, whereas a respected maker could demand as much as fifteen shillings.

After mid-century, Windsor chair manufacturing spread to New York and New England. Ebenezer Stone, a Boston maker of “Warranted Green Windsor Chairs,” advertised that his chairs were “painted equally as well as those made in Philadelphia.” Chairmakers in New York City developed a particularly elegant design in which the hoop-back and the arms were made out of one continuous steam-bent piece of hickory or ash. Because elm was rare, American makers generally used poplar or pine for the seat, and maple for the spindles. As in England, Windsor chairs were either stained or painted—green was popular, so were red and black.

There is nothing rustic about American Windsor chairs, which were as likely to furnish a grand house as a roadside tavern. Jefferson owned more than twenty of them. What he called “stick chairs” stood in the entrance hall of Monticello and were moved around the house as required. He also owned an unusual revolving Windsor chair, in which he is said to have written the Declaration of Independence. Revolving Windsor chairs did not become common until the 1840s, so it is likely that Jefferson himself designed this chair. Washington, too, owned many Windsor chairs. He bought two dozen oval-back Windsor side chairs with fashionable “bamboo” legs from a Philadelphia maker, and placed them on the porch at Mount Vernon; he had the Windsor fan chair in his study, a Windsor armchair in his bedroom, and a Windsor high chair for his grandchildren. The most unusual of Washington's Windsors was his “riding chair,” a cannibalized Windsor chair seat bolted to the frame of a two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy.

Continuous-arm Windsor chair with bamboo legs

The American Windsor chair had many specialized offspring. Windsor settees ranged in length from four to twelve feet. Windsor writing-arm chairs had one arm broadened into an oval writing surface. In some versions, the writing arm had a drawer for paper, pens, and ink; the sewing Windsor had a drawer under the seat. The smoker's bow was a stocky chair with wide arms on which a pipe smoker could rest his elbow. The captain's chair was another low-back Windsor chair, as was the firehouse Windsor. Stools, with three or four legs, were available in a variety of heights. Perhaps the humblest Windsor chair was the stick-back kitchen chair, similar to my flea-market side chairs. Here the design was reduced to its plainest and most utilitarian essentials: a solid shaped seat, a simple comb-back, turned legs and spindles.

When I arrived at the University of Pennsylvania two decades ago, my office was unfurnished, and I was asked what kind of chairs I would like. I chose Windsor chairs—a sack-back armchair for myself, and a bow-back side chair for visitors. The seat was pine, the turned pieces maple, and the bow-back ash. The Warren Chair Works of Warren, Rhode Island, which made my chairs, uses programmed lathes and electrical-powered cutting and drilling machines, instead of pole lathes, pit saws, and carpenter's braces, but the design of my armchair is virtually identical to the sack-back that Benjamin Franklin occupies in Robert Edge Pine's eighteenth-century painting
Congress Voting Independence.

Windsor chairs have been mass-produced since the nineteenth century, and although purists might consider the handmade versions superior, the design of the Windsor chair proved remarkably durable and unlike many handcrafted artifacts it survived industrialization intact. The explanation is simple. “In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness,” observed Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He was describing an airplane, but his observation applies equally to a Windsor chair. Everything extraneous has been removed; no matter how it is fabricated—in a workshop or in a factory—the result is the same. A Windsor chair is not made of fine woods, and it doesn't need to be decorated; its appeal is entirely a function of its proportions and its air of lightness and grace.

Wooden Narcotics

If the Windsor chair could be said to be England's national chair, the quintessential American chair is the rocking chair. Like the Windsor chair, the rocking chair originated as a vernacular product, that is, it was the work of anonymous chairmakers. Nothing could be simpler than adding two curved rockers to an ordinary chair; after all, cradles have had rockers since the Middle Ages. Then why did it take several centuries before someone did it to a chair? Part of the explanation may be the lack of a suitably light and inexpensive chair; medieval armchairs were too heavy, and backstools did not lend themselves to rocking. More important, the symbolic function of chairs precluded adding something as carefree as a rocking motion. It's hard to imagine a cabriole chair or a fauteuil on rockers. For hundreds of years chairs were associated with stability and repose—a chair that rocked back and forth would have seemed undignified.

To a colonial settler living in the wilderness of North America and largely cut off from the conventions of the Old World, a chair that rocked might have appeared slightly less preposterous. Or at least worth trying. Benjamin Franklin owned a rocking chair but he was not its inventor. The earliest record of a rocking chair is a 1742 invoice written by Solomon Fussell, a Philadelphia cabinetmaker who charged six shillings for “one Nurse Chair with rockers.” Nurse chairs, which were common at that time, were low armless side chairs used by wet nurses and nursing mothers. We don't know what Fussell's rocking nurse chair looked like, but judging from the low price it must have been rather plain, probably with a ladder back and a rush bottom.

Infants are lulled to sleep by a gently rocking motion—whether in a mother's arms or in a cradle—so a rocking nurse chair makes sense. Fussell, with a Quaker's taste for simplicity, would certainly have appreciated the idea, but he cannot be credited with the invention. Shortly after he made the nurse chair, a “rocking chair” was listed in the estate of a deceased Chester County, Pennsylvania, resident, which suggests an earlier origin, probably sometime in the early 1700s.