THE "REAL" HITCHCOCK

by Fred Taylor

part 2  part 1

Most of the chairs were painted black or dark green and were decorated by a process using stencils and rubbing a bronzing powder into a tacky finish coat. The result was a lustrous design that came to signify Hitchcock's work. Pin striping was done with paint though never in gold. Striping was of yellow ocher. Gold was reserved for the banding which went only half way around the turns in the legs. By 1825 the company had a new home in a spacious three story brick factory, built near the old one. And Hitchcock had started labeling his chairs with an identifying stencil. Since he employed almost everyone in the town, the town changed its name to "Hitchcocks-ville" and he used that as part of his signature.

The top image shows a correct period Hitchcock stencil from the 1820's. The lower image with the backward "N's" is reproduction made since 1946.

The earliest Hitchcock stencil read "L.HITCHCOCK. HITCHCOCKS-VILLE. CONN. WARRANTED". But here's the catch. Unlike most Hitchcock stencils you may have seen, the original stencil DID NOT have the "N's" backward in "CONN". That little glitch did not appear until 1832 when the company, after a run of bad luck, had been through receivership and emerged in a new corporate form known as the Hitchcock, Alford Company. The "Alford" was Arba Alford, Hitchcock's brother-in-law. During this phase of production the first stencils with backward "N's" appeared, not really surprising when the bulk of the work was done by laborers who could not read or write. They didn't see the difference. While not all chairs from this period had the oddity, many did. That stencil read "HITCHCOCK.ALFORD.&Co. HITCHCOCKSVILLE.CONN. WARRANTED". This company was dissolved in 1843 and Hitchcock started a new chair company in Unionville, CT and his stencils had that town's name in them thereafter. Hitchcock died in 1852.

In 1946 John Tarrant Kenney began to revive the company and today the Hitchcock Chair Company is once again in full swing, stenciling chairs in the original styling and using the wording of the original label. With two small differences. The modern company's "L.HITCHCOCK..." stencil uses the backward "N's", something never seen in the original label. The other disparity is the presence of the circled "R" of the trademark registration of the name, something which did not exist in Hitchcock's day.

So if the "Hitchcock" chair you have seen has a stencil which includes the terms "L.HITCHCOCK" and "HITCHCOCKS-VILLE" but also includes the backward "N's" in "CONN" it is a reproduction made since 1946. That was easy wasn't it?

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