Hitchcock Furniture

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