1. Robert Blair St. George, “A Plymouth Area Chairmaking Tradition of the Late Seventeenth Century,” Middleborough Antiquarian 19, no. 2 (December 1978): 3–12. Some of the chairs and the basic argument of this article are repeated in Robert Blair St. George, The Wrought Covenant: Source Material for the Study of Craftsmen and Community in Southeastern New England 1620–1700 (Brockton, Mass.: Brockton Art Center, 1979), pp. 26–27 and figs. 46–49. The basic source for Nutting’s ideas on dating early turned chairs is the first edition of his Furniture of the Pilgrim Century (Boston: Marshall Jones Co., 1921), which has a discursive text. He noted that turned chairs with posts over two inches in diameter dated back “well into the first Pilgrim generation,” in other words, before 1660 (pp. 182, 184, 192). On page 215, he explicitly stated that the “sizes of posts of chairs are generally above two inches if they reach back into the first pilgrim generation. The largest posts are hardly two and three quarter inches. After 1660 we begin to find posts of two inches diameter the rule. After 1680 the posts are often only an inch and three quarters.” Allowing for the fact that Nutting dated the introduction of the baroque, or “William and Mary,” style to the early 1680s rather than to the mid-1690s, he still presented no concrete evidence for his dating scheme. His scheme is further compromised by his reliance on the replaced posts of the Standish chair at Pilgrim Hall as a securely dated monument (the chair is thought to date from before Myles Standish’s death in 1656). Modern commentators, following St. George, tend to date chairs based on a distinction between the pre-1695 mannerist style and the post-1695 baroque style, without much emphasis on a single trait like post diameter. Even this cautious approach fails to aid interpretation of mannerist-style chairs made after 1695 by provincial turners, some of whom incorporated baroque ornaments in their old-fashioned formats.

2. In his revised Furniture of the Pilgrim Century, 2 vols. (Framingham, Mass.: Old America Co., 1924), Nutting drastically shortened his text and relied on captions; nevertheless, it was here that he introduced the term “semi-Brewster,” which is not found in the 1921 version of his book. He used the term in reference to entry 1823 (here illustrated as fig. 10) and to entry 1826 (here illustrated as fig. 22). Nutting was clearly puzzled by the fact that these Tinkham-type chairs had only one tier of spindles under the seat, since he thought a chair required two to be a full-fledged “Brewster”; however, he referred to entry 1802 (here illustrated as fig. 9)—a Boston chair with only one tier of spindles below the seat—as a “Brewster” and noted that “The Term Brewster Is Applied to Chairs Having Spindle Work below the Seat.”

3. Peter Thornton has identified Dutch chairs as a staple of the export trade and an important influence on the turned chair industry in northern Europe. See Peter Thornton, Seventeenth-Century Interior Decoration in England France & Holland (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), pp. 206–7; and Peter Thornton, Authentic Decor: The Domestic Interior 1620–1920 (New York: Viking, 1984), pp. 24 and 59.

4. Benno M. Forman, “Continental Furniture Craftsmen in London: 1511–1625,” Furniture History 7 (1971): 94–120.

5. The Bradford, Brewster, and Standish chairs are by the same hand and constitute the work of a second unidentified Plymouth-area chairmaking shop. The Keith chair is illustrated in Richard H. Randall, American Furniture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: By the museum, 1965), pp. 155–56. The Boston board-seated turned chairs consist of the Tufts family chair (Metropolitan Museum of Art), the Mather family child’s high chair (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts), the John Eliot chair (private institutional collection), and a chair with no history of ownership (Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities). Board seats also occur on a small number of chairs attributed to Boston, Connecticut, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina. The Connecticut examples are the Robbins family chair (Connecticut Historical Society), a slat-back armchair with no history of ownership (Historic Deerfield), and a spindle-back armchair with no history of ownership (private collection). The only New York example reputedly descended in the Strycker family (Metropolitan Museum of Art); however, it is quite similar to the Robbins chair at the Connecticut Historical Society and may have been made in Connecticut. The only Virginia example is a child’s high chair that descended in the Lee family (see Ronald L. Hurst and Jonathan Prown, Southern Furniture, 1680–1830: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection [New York: Harry Abrams for the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1997], pp. 57–59). The only South Carolina example is also in the Colonial Williamsburg collection (see Luke Beckerdite, “Religion, Artisanry, and Cultural Identity: The Huguenot Experience in South Carolina, 1680–1730,” in American Furniture, edited by Luke Beckerdite [Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England for the Chipstone Foundation, 1997], p. 208, fig. 15; and Hurst and Prown, Southern Furniture, 1680–1830, pp. 52–54). All of these board-seated turned chairs will be the subject of articles in a future volume of American Furniture.

6. See Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture: 1630–1730 (New York: W. W. Norton for the Winterthur Museum, 1988), pp. 76–79. The first scholar to suggest that Salem chairs could be distinguished from Boston ones was Robert Blair St. George, in “New England Turned Chairs of the Seventeenth Century: A Preliminary Survey,” unpublished manuscript, 1978, in the author’s possession. The most important Salem turned chair descended in the English family (Peabody-Essex Museum). A note of caution in all these attributions resides in the Dutch sources for English turned chair traditions, which, as asserted above, are not easily identified.

7. The chair from the Metropolitan Museum of Art was first identified as a Tinkham-type example in Brian Cullity, A Cubberd, Four Joyne Stools & Other Smalle Thinges: The Material Culture of Plymouth Colony and Silver and Silversmiths of Plymouth, Cape Cod & Nantucket (Sandwich, Mass.: Heritage Plantation of Sandwich, 1994), p. 123. The Bartlett chair traditionally resided in one of two family houses in the southern part of Plymouth called Manomet. Family tradition maintains that the chair descended in the paternal line from the patriarch Robert Bartlett until the eighth generation. The tintype illustrated in fig. 12 shows (7) Isaac Bartlett (1796–1880) seated in the chair. Tracing the chair back from Isaac’s generation in both male and female lines cannot demonstrate unequivocally that the history is accurate, but it does suggest that it is plausible. Isaac’s father (6) Joseph died in 1835. His room-by-room inventory lists three armchairs valued between 25 and 40 cents. The one most likely to be the chair illustrated in fig. 11 was in the front keeping room (Plymouth County Probate Records [hereinafter cited PCPR], vol. 77, p. 180). Joseph was married to Anna Clark, but no separate inventory for her exists. The inventory of her father, James Clark (1723–1815) of Plymouth, lists two great chairs valued at $1.25 (PCPR, vol. 47, pp. 106–8). In his will, James divided his movable estate among his daughters (PCPR, vol. 47, pp. 103–5). Joseph Bartlett’s father was (5) Captain Zacheus Bartlett (1725–1801), a Plymouth physician. Zacheus’s inventory lists a great chair valued at $2.00 and an old great chair together with four small chairs valued at $4.00 (PCPR, vol. 37, p. 426). Zacheus married his distant cousin Margaret Barnes, daughter of Jonathan Barnes and Phoebe Finney. No inventory exists for Jonathan Barnes’s estate, but his wife’s father, Josiah Finney, owned three great chairs when he died in 1726 (PCPR, vol. 5, p. 220). Zacheus Bartlett’s father (4) Joseph (1693–1756) married his cousin Elizabeth (Bartlett) Bartlett (ca. 1700–1773). No probate inventory exists for Joseph, and no specific listings of chairs are in the inventories of Elizabeth’s father, Samuel Bartlett (PCPR, vol. 3, p. 291), or her grandfather, Benjamin Bartlett of Duxbury (PCPR, vol. 1, pp. 113–15). Joseph’s parents were (3) Joseph and Lydia (Griswold) Bartlett. The elder Joseph died in 1703, and his inventory lumped all his chairs together (PCPR, vol. 3, p. 106). Lydia Griswold Bartlett was from a Connecticut family. The parents of the third-generation Joseph were (2) Joseph (ca. 1639–1711/12) and Hannah Pope (1639–1709/10). The second-generation Joseph purchased the property in Manomet. He is thought to have built the 1660 Bartlett house on the original tract, whereas his son built the 1680 house. The inventory of the second-generation Joseph is too general to identify the chair (PCPR, vol. 2, p. 52). Although it is not possible to identify the Bartlett chair in the successive inventories of the family with certainty, the patrilineal descent of the object is quite plausible, and almost all the women who married into this line came from local families. The genealogical information in this footnote is from Robert Wakefield, ed., Mayflower Families in Progress: Robert Bartlett of the Anne (Plymouth, Mass.: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1995), passim.

8. St. George, Wrought Covenant, p. 46. For the Boston sources of some Plymouth turned ornaments on case pieces, see Robert F. Trent, “The Lawton Cupboard: A Unique Masterpiece of Early Boston Joinery and Turning,” Maine Antique Digest 16, no. 3 (March 1988): 1C–4C.

9. The origins of the John Carver history associated with this chair are obscure. The chair was donated to the Pilgrim Society in 1820 by Joseph Head of Boston, who also donated a pewter plate said to have belonged to Myles Standish. The entry in the minutes of the secretary to the Pilgrim Society acknowledging these donations mentions a letter from Head that accompanied the artifacts, but the letter has not been located. In 1995, Jeremy Bangs, former visiting curator of manuscripts at the Pilgrim Society, found an 1818 manuscript from a “Mr. Tufts Museum” in Plymouth that included a “Carver’s Chair” (Samuel Davis Papers, Pilgrim Society). Throughout the nineteenth century, the chair was thought to have belonged to Governor John Carver, who died in 1621. It was illustrated in several publications during the 1840s and 1850s, notably Alexander Young’s Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers (1841) and Calvin Wheeler Philleo, Jr., “A Pilgrimage to Plymouth,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 8, no. 43 (1853–1854): 49. The first attempts to determine the origin of the chair through microanalysis of the woods were either inconclusive or inaccurate (see Jonathan Fairbanks, “Four Pilgrim Chairs,” Winterthur Newsletter 9, no. 7 [September 30, 1963]: 1–3). A sample analyzed by the Department of Forestry at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1995 suggested that the chair is made partly of American ash; however, most wood anatomists dispute the validity of separating American and European ashes. The obvious inaccuracy of the Carver history has led to speculation that the chair descended from the Howland family, because John Howland came on the Mayflower as Governor Carver’s servant. The connection between a John Carver who died in Marshfield in 1679 and the early governor has never been established, and no reason exists to think the chair belonged to this later individual. How Joseph Head obtained the Carver chair and the Standish plate is unclear. The 1790 census lists two men named Joseph Head, one in Westport (Bristol County) and the other in Boston (Heads of Families at the First Census of the United States Taken in 1790, Massachusetts [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1908]). The individual in Westport had ancestors in the Plymouth area but was not alive in 1820. The Joseph Head (1761–1836) of Boston was the son of John Head (1725–1776) of Ipswich in Suffolk, England, and his wife, Jane MacKenzie (1735–1818) of Scotland (Ann Felter Sandy, “Head Family History,” ms. dated July 4, 1992, Head Family Papers, Box 1, Massachusetts Historical Society). Joseph Head’s first wife, Elizabeth White Frazier (1764–1798), descended from an Ipswich, Massachusetts, family. His second wife, Lydia Chandler (1770–1837), was the daughter of merchant John Chandler and Lydia Ward of Petersham, Massachusetts. Lydia Chandler Head’s ancestors were from Roxbury. Although some members of this Roxbury branch of the Chandler family (who lived in Bristol, Rhode Island, and Woodstock, Connecticut) married descendants of Plymouth County families, no leads regarding the chair donated by Head have surfaced (George Chandler, The Descendants of William and Annis Chandler Who Settled in Roxbury, 1637 [Worcester, Mass.: Press of C. Hamilton, 1883], passim). A group of slat-back armchairs with pommels considerably greater in diameter than the posts have been associated with Lebanon and Norwich, Connecticut, since the 1890s. For more on these chairs, see Minor Myers, Jr., and Edgar D. Mayhew, New London County Furniture 1640–1840 (New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Museum, 1974), p. 15. A somewhat more cogent analysis of these chairs is in Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 124–28.

10. The Russell chair, sometimes referred to as the Winslow chair or even the Winslow-Hayward-Russell chair, is illustrated in St. George, “A Plymouth Area Chairmaking Tradition,” p. 6, fig. 3. This illustration was silhouetted from a photo of the interior of the Harlow house in Plymouth taken about 1900. Because of this photo, St. George associated the chair with the Harlow family. He did not realize that the chair resided a few streets away in the residence of Allen D. Russell (1897–1984). Russell recalled that the chair was always known as the Winslow chair. Genealogical research by Mr. Russell’s daughter Mimi Aldrich and Robert F. Trent shows how the chair could have descended through the Winslow family to Mr. Russell: (2) Governor Josiah Winslow (1629–1680); to his son (3) Isaac (1671–1738); to his son (4) John (1703–1774); to his son (5) Pelham (1737–1784); to his daughter (6) Joanna Winslow Hayward (1773–1816), who married Dr. Nathan Hayward (1763–1848); to their daughter (7) Mary Winslow Hayward Russell (b. 1798), who married William S. Russell (1792–1863); to his nephew (8) John Jackson (1823–1897); to his son (9) John (1860–1939); to his son (10) Allen D. (1897–1984). New research suggests that both the Hayward and Winslow family lines are important in accessing the validity of tradition regarding the chair’s history. No probate inventory exists for Dr. Nathan Hayward of Bridgewater, one of several physicians in the extended Hayward-Winslow-Warren family. His wife (6) Joanna Winslow is more important. She and her sister, Mary Winslow Warren, were the only children of (5) Pelham Winslow and his wife, Joanna White (1744–1829) of Marshfield (Ruth McGyre and Robert Wakefield, Mayflower Families Through Five Generations, Edward Winslow [Plymouth, Mass.: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1997], pp. 18–19). At the outbreak of the Revolution, (5) Pelham Winslow and his cousin (5) Edward Winslow fled to Boston as Loyalists, and Pelham’s property was confiscated in 1779. The listing includes six mahogany chairs (PCPR, vol. 25, p. 458). Joanna and her two children remained behind in Plymouth. After Pelham’s death in 1784, what little remained of his estate could not support his widow and daughters (William T. Davis, Plymouth Memories of an Octogenarian [Plymouth, Mass.: Bittinger Bros., 1906], p. 163). Joanna White Winslow’s mother, Joanna Howland White (1716–1810), bequeathed her “the Bed Chairs and Looking Glass in the easterly back Chamber in which she usually sleeps,” but her will did not mention an armchair (PCPR, vol. 43, p. 446). Joanna White Winslow’s father was (5) Gideon White (1716–1779) of Plymouth. His probate inventory lists “1 armed Chair” valued at £6 in inflated Continental currency (PCPR, vol. 28, p. 16). Gideon’s father, Cornelius (1682–1755), had a group of unspecified chairs listed in his inventory (PCPR, vol. 14, p. 402). Cornelius’s wife, Joanna Howland, was the daughter of Thomas Howland (d. 1741), a prosperous landowner of Plymouth. His inventory included “1 Great Chair” worth 10s. (PCPR, vol. 8, p. 135). This is one possible source for the “Winslow” chair. Returning to the direct Winslow line, no inventory exists for (4) General John Winslow, who died intestate just before the Revolution; however, his father’s generation provides extremely important documentation. (3) Isaac Winslow (ca. 1671–1738) and his wife, Sarah Wensley (1673–1754), owned a large Marshfield farm called “Careswell,” which he inherited from his father, Governor Josiah. In 1699, Isaac built a large house that, with alterations made by his son, still stands. His probate inventory contains only a generalized listing for chairs (PCPR, vol. 8, p. 29), but his wife’s inventory, taken in inflated old Tenor currency, lists one old chair at £1.6.8. Other chairs are described as cane back, flowered (presumably needlework or turkeywork rather than veneered), and easy. The “old chair” could be the one shown in fig. 1 (PCPR, vol. 13, p. 327). Isaac Winslow’s father, Josiah, died in 1680, which is too early for the latter to have owned the chair. Barring a more thorough search of the evidence, it does not seem possible to corroborate the Winslow-Hayward-Russell history. The aforementioned William S. Russell (1792–1863) was the Plymouth town clerk and author of Guide to Plymouth and Recollections of the Pilgrims (1846). His first cousin, Nathaniel Russell II (1801–1853), owned the William Bradford turned armchair, which he inherited from his mother’s LeBaron ancestors, who were Bradford descendants.

The Churchill chair survives in fragmentary condition. Only the right front post is entirely original. The right rear consists of an original maple upper half and a replaced ash lower half. The replaced left front post is oak, and the replaced right rear post is ash. Only two of the spindles in the back are original, but all those under the arms are original. The spindles under the seat, which appear to have been moved up one stretcher in the frame, are replacements. The chair was probably cut down in height due to severe insect infestation. Subsequent infestation probably prompted the wholesale replacement of many parts. The Churchill chair is illustrated and discussed in St. George, “A Plymouth Area Chairmaking Tradition,” p. 5, fig. 2; Cullity, A Cubberd, Four Joyne Stools & Other Smalle Thinges, p. 124; and Helen Comstock, “Pilgrim Chairs,” Antiques 68, no. 5 (November 1955): 451. Comstock suggested that the chair was originally owned by Eleazor Churchill, the son of John Churchill who arrived in Plymouth by 1643. As both St. George and Comstock noted, colonial revival architect Joseph Everett Chandler of Boston donated the chair to Pilgrim Hall. His father, Albert H. Churchill Chandler, was the son of Joseph Chandler and Eliza Churchill of Duxbury. Although St. George suggested that Eliza had inherited the chair, it may have entered the Chandler family through another route. Albert H. Churchill Chandler married Adeline F. Harlow of Plymouth, and the couple shared at least two ancestors. The most plausible line of descent for the chair through the Churchill family is similar to that proposed by St. George, except that he skipped one generation. This line is as follows: (1) John Churchill to (2) Eleazor Churchill (1652–1716), to (3) Stephen Churchill (1685–1750), to (4) Stephen Churchill (1717–1751), to (5) Stephen Churchill (b. 1743), to (6) Peleg Churchill (1769–1810), to his daughter (7) Eliza, who married Joseph Chandler.

Moving backwards through the Churchill line, several other ways in which the chair might have descended become apparent. Peleg Churchill of Plymouth married Hannah Hosea of Duxbury in 1791. He was a cooper who died in 1810 with unspecified furniture listed in his inventory (PCPR, vol. 43, p. 362). Peleg Churchill’s contemporary, Joseph Chandler (1769–1795) of Kingston, was another great-grandfather of Joseph Everett Chandler, the donor. The former Joseph’s inventory listed “2 great chairs, 3 crow foot chairs & 6 common Ditto” (PCPR, vol. 35, p. 190). Perhaps one of these great chairs is the example in question.

(5) Stephen Churchill of Plymouth married Lucy Burbank in 1766. No probate documents survive for either of them. His father, Stephen (1717–1751), married Hannah Barnes (1718–1793) of Plymouth in 1738. The inventory for Stephen of the fourth generation contains a generalized reference to chairs (PCPR, vol. 13, p. 106). The Barnes family of Plymouth had genealogical ties to the Bartletts, Churchills, Chandlers, Standishes, and Carvers, all of whom have some association with chairs in this article. The Barnes family descends from (1) John Barnes, who was a resident of Plymouth by 1633, and his wife, Mary Plummer. (4) Hannah Barnes Churchill’s father, Jonathan Barnes (b. 1684), was a brother of (3) William Barnes (1670–1751/52), who was the great-great-great-grandfather of Adeline Harlow, mother of Joseph Everett Chandler, the donor of the Churchill chair. William Barnes married Alice Bradford (1680–1725), daughter of William Bradford and (3) Rebecca Bartlett. William and Jonathan Barnes’s brother (3) John married (4) Mary Bartlett, daughter of (3) Joseph Bartlett. The Barnes brothers’ sister (3) Mary (b. 1667) married John Carver of Duxbury. Their daughter, Mary Carver (b. 1695), married Thomas Standish. The aforementioned genealogical information is derived from William T. Davis, ed., Genealogical Register of Plymouth Families (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing, 1975), pp. 10–12, 51–59, 124–29; Robert Wakefield, ed., Robert Bartlett of the Anne, pp. 54–5; Robert Wakefield, ed., Mayflower Families Through Five Generations: Family of Myles Standish (Plymouth, Mass.: General Society of the Mayflower Descendants, 1996), p. 13.

Stephen Churchill (1685–1750) of the third generation married Experience Ellis of Sandwich in 1708. His probate inventory has a single entry for chairs (PCPR, vol. 12, p. 426). Experience Ellis was undoubtedly related to Benjamin Ellis, the owner of the chair shown in fig. 17. Information on the second generation is sparse. Eleazor Churchill (1652–1716) married a Mary whose family is unknown. No probate documents exist for them. His daughter, Jedidah Churchill (b. 1687), married Thomas Harlow (b. 1686), a distant ancestor of Adeline Harlow. Although no exact probate references confirm the presumed line of descent of the Churchill chair cited by St. George, this one is the most plausible. The donor’s mother also had ties to the Churchill family. Almost all the donor’s ancestors were from Plymouth.

Of all the documented Tinkham-type chairs, the Fairbanks example was found farthest from Plymouth County. The chair was purchased by an antiques dealer from Nellie Fairbanks Beane of Phillips, Maine, in the early 1960s. Nellie was a tenth-generation descendant of Jonathan Fairbanks (d. 1668), who built the core of the extant Fairbanks house in Dedham, Massachusetts, in 1637. His descendants in Nellie’s direct line remained in Dedham and Wrentham (near the Rhode Island border) until Joseph Fairbanks (1717–1794) and his wife, Frances, moved to Winthrop, Maine. Their descendants in Maine had three connections to Plymouth area families. (6) Captain Benjamin Fairbanks (1747–1828) married Keturah Luce (1749–1807) of Martha’s Vineyard. Her parents were Joseph Luce (1725–1762), whose family had resided on Martha’s Vineyard for three generations, and Deborah Woolen. Deborah’s maternal grandparents, Stephen Presbury (ca. 1672–1730) and Deborah Skiff (1668–1743), moved to the Vineyard from Sandwich on Cape Cod. They are of the appropriate generation to have purchased the chair. Deborah Skiff’s parents, Stephen Skiff (1641–1710) and Lydia Snow (1640–1711), were from Marshfield. Other members of the Fairbanks family in Maine had ties to Plymouth County, although they are not in the last family owner’s direct ancestral line. They include Captain Benjamin Fairbanks’s brother, (6) Colonel Nathaniel Fairbanks, whose second wife’s ancestors included Chipmans and Watermans, and Benjamin’s son, (7) Columbus Fairbanks (1793–1882), who married a Tinkham. The aforementioned genealogical information is derived from David Thurston, A Brief History of Winthrop (Maine) from 1764 to October 1855 (Portland, Maine: Brown Thurston, 1855), pp. 181–83; Donald Lines Jacobus, Descendants of Robert Waterman, 3 vols. (New Haven, Conn.: Edgar F. Waterman, 1939), passim; Robert S. Wakefield, Mayflower Families Through Five Generations, Peter Brown Family (Plymouth, Mass.: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1992), passim; Robert S. Wakefield, Mayflower Families in Progress, Richard Warren of the Mayflower (Plymouth, Mass.: General Society of Mayflower Descendants, 1997), passim; Isaac Cobb, “Cobb Genealogy,” unpublished manuscript, Burbank, California, 1979, passim; Philip Cobb, A History of the Cobb Family (Cleveland, Ohio: privately printed, 1907), passim; and Martha McCourt et al., The American Descendants of Henry Luce of Martha’s Vineyard (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1994), passim.

The present owner of the Fairbanks chair commissioned studies of it by the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities Conservation Center in 1989. David H. Mitchell examined the structure of the chair, and Joseph Godla performed pigment analysis. The Carver and Winslow chairs (figs. 1, 16) retain some of their original paint, but neither has been sampled for analysis. The Carver chair appears to have been painted entirely black, whereas the Winslow example was red.

11. These two chairs were first published in Cullity, A Cubberd Four Joyne Stools & Other Small Thinges, p. 125. Norwich turned chairs (see Minor Myers, Jr., and Edgar D. Mayhew, New London County Furniture, 1640–1840 [New London, Conn.: Lyman Allyn Museum, 1974], p. 15; and Forman, American Seating Furniture, pp. 124–28) are a prime stylistic source for many later chairmaking traditions in Connecticut that featured slanted turned arms, and many of these traditions also featured outsized pommels or hand grips. For examples of these traditions, see Robert F. Trent, Hearts & Crowns: Folk Chairs of the Connecticut Coast 1720–1840 (New Haven, Conn.: New Haven Colony Historical Society, 1977), pp. 56–59 and 82–86. R. Ridgeway, “Governor Bradford’s Chair,” Windham Historical Society Newsletter, July 1983, pp. 4–6.

12. St. George, “A Plymouth Area Chairmaking Tradition,” p. 7. The authors recorded the scribed pattern lines of several of the principal chairs from the Tinkham tradition and plotted the measurements on a single sheet of paper using the seat rail line as a common datum point. Since the posts of many chairs have been eroded, damaged, or trimmed at the bottom, the seat rail was the most logical index. The idea that a chair design could be memorized and replicated through manipulation of a tool handle or lathe tool rest was formulated by John D. Alexander, Jr., a woodworking historian of Baltimore, Maryland.