Acknowledgments  
For assistance with this article the author thanks Karie Diethorn, Brock Jobe, Jane Kolter, Martin Edward Schnall, and especially Philip Zea, who asked me to think beyond the arm rail and who read many drafts. This work would not have been possible without the earlier scholarship and contributions of many students of Windsor furniture, including Charles Dorman, Nancy Goyne Evans, Wallace Nutting, Thomas Ormsbee, and Charles Santore. The article is dedicated to the late Alonzo Lee Nichols, who gave me the ability to know what I was looking at and the courage to follow my eye, and to my wife, Elaine Ulman, who started me down a long twisting path when she refused to have chairs that might come to pieces in our living room.

1. Please email comments to d.pesuit@verizon.net.

2. Nancy Goyne Evans, American Windsor Chairs (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in association with the Winterthur Museum, 1996), pp. 38–50. Charles Santore, The Windsor Style in America, 1730–1830 (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1981), pp. 32–35. Santore published a second volume with the same title in 1987. Both volumes were reissued as a single book in 1992.

3. William MacPherson Hornor, Blue Book: Philadelphia Furniture (Philadelphia: By the author, 1935), p. 298. Inventory of Robert Tucker taken September 5, 1768, and recorded February 1770, Norfolk County Appraisments, no. 1, 1755–1783, pp. 117a–120. The author thanks Robert Leath, Curator of Historic Interiors, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, for providing this reference.

4. New York Gazette, January 4, 1762, as quoted in Evans, American Windsor Chairs, p. 67; and Rita Susswein Gottesman, The Arts and Crafts in New York, 1726–1776 (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1938), p. 123. In 1766 the South Carolina Gazette reported that the mercantile firm Sheed and White had imported Philadelphia Windsor chairs in the brig Philadelphia Packet, as quoted in Harrold E. Gillingham, “The Philadelphia Windsor Chair and Its Wanderings,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 55 (1931): 301–32.

5. South Carolina Gazette and General Advertiser, October 14, 1783, as quoted in Santore, Windsor Style, 1: 44, and Evans, American Windsor Chairs, p. 598. United States Chronicle (Providence, Rhode Island), July 19, 1787, as quoted in Irving Whitall Lyon, The Colonial Furniture of New England: A Study of the Domestic Furniture in Use in New England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1891; reprint, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1977), pp. 180–81; Santore, Windsor Style, 1: 44, and Evans, American Windsor Chairs, pp. 272–73. Santore, Windsor Style, 1: 44.

6. A chair similar to the one shown in figure 8, with a long history of ownership in the Edward Littlefield family of Andover, Massachusetts, appeared at auction in 1999 (Antiques and the Arts Weekly, November 12, 1999, p. 82). This chair had sold on the North Shore of Massachusetts several years earlier.

7. Both equations are based on the assumption that the material is homogeneous, that its properties do not vary significantly from one cross section to another or within the cross section itself.

8. For more information pertaining to equations 1 and 2, see Ferdinand Beer and E. Russell Johnston, Mechanics of Materials, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1981), p. 156.

9. For the comb-back chairs with steam-bent arms and rounded rails dated 1750 or earlier, see Santore, Windsor Style, 1: figs. 8, 20–22, 25–28, and 2: figs. 1–6. For the five examples with rectangular back rails dated 1750–1770, see ibid., 1: figs. 7, 9, 10, and 2: figs. 31, 34. The three chairs with squared-off arm rails dated 1750–1770 are illustrated in ibid., 1: figs. 94–97, and 2: figs. 75–80.

10. As quoted in Horner, The Blue Book of Philadelphia Furniture, p. 300.

11. Small Philadelphia fan-back Windsors with rounded seats are illustrated in Evans, American Windsor Chairs, figs. 3-29, 3-34, and Santore, Windsor Style, 1: fig. 81. Chairs with Gilpin’s brand are illustrated in Evans, American Windsor Chairs, figs. 3-3, 3-4, 3-5, and Santore, Windsor Style, 1: fig. 26. Philadelphia chairs with boldly shaped handholds are illustrated in Santore, Windsor Style, 1: fig. 8, 2: figs. 14, 16. For comparisons with the handholds of formal chairs, see Harold Sack and Deanne Levison, “American Roundabout Chairs,” Antiques 139, no. 5 (May 1991): 934–47, or their “Queen Anne and Chippendale Armchairs in America,” Antiques 137, no. 5 (May 1990): 1166–77. For an even closer cognate, compare these handholds with the crests of a few formal Philadelphia chairs in J. Michael Flanigan, American Furniture in the Kaufman Collection (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1986), p. 28, or Helen Comstock, American Furniture: A Complete Guide to Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Styles (New York: Viking Press, 1962), no. 263.

12. A representative Lancaster chair is illustrated in Evans, American Windsor Chairs, fig. 3-58. The Frederick armchair is illustrated and discussed in ibid., pp. 120–21, fig. 3-84.

13. Trumbull’s bill is reproduced in Nicholas B. Wainwright, Colonial Grandeur in Philadelphia: The House and Furniture of General John Cadwalader (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1964), p. 58.

14. Nancy A. Goyne, “Francis Trumble of Philadelphia, Windsor Chair and Cabinetmaker,” Winterthur Portfolio 1 (1964): 239.

15. The Branded Furniture of Independence National Historic Park, edited by Jane B. Kolter and Lynne A. Leopold-Sharp (Philadelphia: Independence National Historical Park, 1981), p. 7.

16. Santore, Windsor Style, 1: 67. An entry in the Carpenters’ Hall account book notes that members of the company paid for the chairs, but it does not identify the maker: “N.B. the Chairs are not allowed as all the members that furnished them made no charge.” None of the members is known to have made chairs. The author thanks Ruth O’Brien, director of Carpenters’ Hall, for the following information from the Carpenters’ Hall Building Records Database, transcribed from Charles E. Peterson, “Carpenters Hall,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 43, part 1 (1953): “When Carpenters’ Hall was about half completed, the Library Company of Philadelphia . . . was offered the opportunity of renting part of it. The library, then in the State House, was particularly short of space for its ‘philosophical apparatus’ . . . Agreement was reached on October 26, 1772, and the Carpenters’ Company proceeded to ‘furnish the house ready for the Library Company to move in.’ The latter appointed a committee for fitting up the new quarters, and Thomas Nevell of the Carpenters’ Company was engaged to do the joinery. The minute book shows that . . . a dozen Windsor chairs, six brass sconces and two chandeliers were also provided. The Library Company moved in September 6, 1773.”

17. Evans, American Windsor Chairs, p. 97.

18. Santore attributes eight Windsors with steam-bent arms to Rhode Island (Windsor Style, 1: figs. 106, 114, 118, 2: figs. 107–111). If chairs with D-shaped seats are excluded, four of the remaining five chairs have rectangular rails.

19. Santore, Windsor Style, 1: figs. 107, 108; 2: fig. 87. For more on the Hampton and Always chair, see Charles Santore, “The New York Windsor,” Maine Antique Digest, July 1987, p. C-10, fig. 5. According to Santore, Hampton and Always were in partnership in 1792, but Evans dates the beginning of the partnership to 1795–1796 (Evans, American Windsor Chairs).

20. For the armchairs with 21 1/2-inch seat widths attributed to Boston and Rhode Island, see Evans, American Windsor Chairs, figs. 6-33, 6-37, 6-40, 6-42, 6-47, 6-50, 6-131, 6-132, 6-146, 6-194, and 6-199. For chairs with greater leg splay, see ibid., figs. 6-33, 6-37, 6-40, 6-42, 6-47, 6-50, and 6-132.

21. For more on Blackford, see ibid., p. 350, fig. 6-194.

22. For Windsors with tall backs from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and New England, see ibid., figs. 3-62, 3-65 3-66, 6-37, 6-81, 6-101, and 6-132. For more on seating for invalids and the elderly, see ibid., p. 112.
23. The author thanks Karie Diethorn, curator at Independence National Historical Park, for this information.

24. See figs. 1, 4, and 40 in this article and table 5.

25. Saeed Moveni, Finite Element Analysis, Theory and Application with ANSYS (New York: Prentice Hall, 2003).

26. For more on Ephraim Evans, see Evans, American Windsor Chairs, p. 692. For more on Windsors made in the southwest of England, see Bernard D. Cotton, The English Regional Chair (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1990), p. 274.

27. Michael Dunbar, Make a Windsor Chair with Michael Dunbar (Newton, Conn.: Taunton Press, 1984).

28. Ibid., p. 27.

29. Ibid., p. 24. Dunbar is probably following an old tradition when he dries the medial stretcher before installation to minimize shrinkage after it is installed.

30. For more on the construction of early turned chairs, see Benno M. Forman, American Seating Furniture, 1630–1730 (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1988), p. 105. Thomas H. Ormsbee, The Windsor Chair (New York: Deerfield Books, 1962), p. 30. Santore, Windsor Style, p. 198.

31. Although this work presents a new methodology, it leaves many questions unanswered while opening new avenues for further research. The tension between style and strength should be examined in the development of Windsor seating from every colony and state. There are also questions regarding very early American Windsors and their relation to British antecedents and seminal Philadelphia work. Since the Philadelphia Society of Friends ran a Windsor chair manufactory where members apprenticed their sons and relatives, the minutes of monthly meetings might reveal a great deal about Philadelphia makers and the conflicts among them. Similarly, the minutes of early Friends meetings in Massachusetts and Rhode Island might provide insights into who made some of the stronger unsigned New England chairs “after the Piladelphia mode.” The technological tricks that have allowed some Windsors to survive daily use without repair for more than two centuries should also be tested and compared. The relative strength of single- and double-wedged joints, strength of stretcher joints, and effect of joint length and diameter deserve special attention. Failure tests comparing early assembly methods would provide a strong basis for further analytical work.