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 THE "REAL" HITCHCOCK
by Fred Taylor
Everyone knows what a Hitchcock chair is. Right? The
small rickety chairs with the rush or cane seats,
usually painted black with lots of leaves and flowers
and fruit painted all over it. Sometimes they have solid
seats that show a dark natural wood surrounded by black
paint and gold stripes and more leaves painted on the
top of the back rail. Often the chairs will gold stripes
and gold banding painted around the legs. They are
important for that "early American" look in decorating
circles. Sometimes the chairs are even signed by
Hitchcock with the name of the town in Connecticut on
the rear rail.
But even if it is signed how do you know if it is a
"real" Hitchcock chair? Anybody can sign a chair and if
it is signed does that mean it is old? How old? A little
history can solve all the questions about Hitchcock
chairs.
Lambert Hitchcock was born in 1795 in Cheshire, CT to a
family that had come to the Colonies 160 years earlier.
By 1814 he was apprenticed to Silas Cheney of Litchfield
as a woodworker and by 1818 he had moved to a small
community in the township of Barkhamsted known as
Fork-of-the-Rivers at the junction of the Farmington and
Still Rivers. The settlement was little more than an
accumulation of log cabins and a sawmill but Hitchcock
saw promise there and went to work in the sawmill owned
by some family acquaintances.
While working with Silas Cheney, Hitchcock had been
influenced by the work of Eli Terry, the legendary clock
maker who designed cheap wooden works to replace
expensive brass works for his clocks in order to reach a
wider market. To produce his wooden works in sufficient
quantity to make it worthwhile Terry devised an assembly
line process of cutting and assembling the various
parts. Hitchcock wanted to do the same thing with
chairs.
In a small shed attached to the sawmill and tapping into
the mill's power source, Hitchcock began to turn out a
small number of unfinished individual chair components.
He sold these to Yankee traders who sold them to
mercantile stores as replacement parts for broken
chairs. His business was so successful he had to hire
extra help. His output eventually became so great that
he expanded his market to the South, shipping great
quantities of chair parts to Charleston, SC for further
distribution. But he still had the dream of producing
complete, finished chairs. In 1820-21 he acquired an
existing wooden two story building near the sawmill and
began to produce the ubiquitous "Hitchcock" chair. The
design was loosely based on the popular Sheraton style
of the time but also included some ideas from Empire
chairs and the famous "Baltimore" chairs.
Cont'd
Part 2 |
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