From Our Collection
Like other inventions that you think must have been in wide use since the beginning of time, the child’s high chair was not a common fixture of the American home until the mass production of furniture after the Civil War made it so. Examples of high chairs in colonial America date to the early 18th century and were mostly British imports. Yes, some upper-middle class and affluent Americans and Europeans did own high chairs in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s, but this was a specialized piece of furniture, so if you could not afford a chair for the adults, a child’s high chair was likely also out of reach. |
In the early 1800’s the already popular Windsor chair began being mass produced in America. Its turned legs, spindle backs and simple solid wood seat were readily interchangeable, and parts could be ordered from mills and assembled by small-scale furniture makers. Assembly-line Windsor chair factories sprung up around 1820 (almost a century before Henry Ford’s auto plant), making chairs for the first time affordable to most Americans. The iconic and ubiquitous Hitchcock Chair, made not too far away in the Connecticut Valley, produced 15,000 chairs between 1820-1830. With chairs more affordable, families could buy specialized furniture like high chairs. High chairs made in the early 1800’s were essentially a Windsor chair scaled down to child size, but with extra long legs. The chair would be placed up to the family table and the mother could feed her toddler while sitting herself. The tray table and footrest features did not exist on high chairs before the 1830s. The fact that some antique high chairs made in the late 1700’s had footrests and tray tables added in the 1800’s shows that they were so valued that they were passed down within families for a generation or two. |
The addition of the tray table, bars, or straps meant that a busy mother could keep her baby restrained and occupied with toys while she went about her kitchen chores nearby. High chairs both kept the toddler safe from the various dangers in a typical kitchen, but also they were (and still are), prone to tipping over and unsafe in their own right.
The Windsor-style high chair remained popular until the 1840’s when ornate Renaissance-inspired Victorian styles became the fashion in furniture across the board. By the late 1860’s though, a simpler cleaner style championed by William Morris in Britain had made its way across the Atlantic through the popular book by Charles Eastlake, “Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details.” The book highly influenced interior decorating in America in the 1870s-1890s. As one furniture historian online writes:
“In his book, Eastlake presented a vision for home furnishings that rejected the strong curves and high relief carvings of Victorian furniture, particularly those attached to the French Baroque Revival and Second Empire styles. Instead, Eastlake presented furniture that was angular, rectilinear, and reduced to simpler geometric shapes. At the same time, he did not disavow ornamentation completely as in some country and mission styles, but reduced it to low reliefs that created less dramatic shadows. Most of the decorative elements in Eastlake's style were through geometrically shaped brackets, spindles, trestles, and other elements.”
Eastlake, reflective of the early Arts and Crafts movement that his book helped popularize, put more value on simple, finely crafted furniture of the artisan craftsman as opposed to mass-produced factory furniture. Ironically his book’s influence on American interior decorating tastes spurred on a boom of factory-made furniture to supply the increased demand among consumers for pieces in the Eastlake style. Eastlake had a poor opinion of the factory-made pieces inspired by his book, but that’s a much longer story than can be touched upon here.
The Windsor-style high chair remained popular until the 1840’s when ornate Renaissance-inspired Victorian styles became the fashion in furniture across the board. By the late 1860’s though, a simpler cleaner style championed by William Morris in Britain had made its way across the Atlantic through the popular book by Charles Eastlake, “Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details.” The book highly influenced interior decorating in America in the 1870s-1890s. As one furniture historian online writes:
“In his book, Eastlake presented a vision for home furnishings that rejected the strong curves and high relief carvings of Victorian furniture, particularly those attached to the French Baroque Revival and Second Empire styles. Instead, Eastlake presented furniture that was angular, rectilinear, and reduced to simpler geometric shapes. At the same time, he did not disavow ornamentation completely as in some country and mission styles, but reduced it to low reliefs that created less dramatic shadows. Most of the decorative elements in Eastlake's style were through geometrically shaped brackets, spindles, trestles, and other elements.”
Eastlake, reflective of the early Arts and Crafts movement that his book helped popularize, put more value on simple, finely crafted furniture of the artisan craftsman as opposed to mass-produced factory furniture. Ironically his book’s influence on American interior decorating tastes spurred on a boom of factory-made furniture to supply the increased demand among consumers for pieces in the Eastlake style. Eastlake had a poor opinion of the factory-made pieces inspired by his book, but that’s a much longer story than can be touched upon here.
This high chair is very true to Eastlake style furniture of the time, with its angular carved seatback and shallow notched carved ornamentation. The fact that it is convertible, with a mechanical steel lever in the back that transforms it from a high chair with tray table, to one that can be put up to the dining table once the tray is flipped back, to a stroller (note the wheels), and a low rocking chair…well that sums up the late 1800’s perfectly. This is the period that embraced invention perhaps more than any other time in history. It is the time when the foundations of electric power, engine power, the car, the plane, the telephone…on and on, were being established. There was nothing in day-to-day life that a gadget or nifty mechanical feature could not revolutionize, or at the very least make things a bit easier. More than a hundred years later, a testament to the mechanics, I easily and smoothly adjusted the chair from a raised to a rocking position by pulling the lever on the back. The chair is light, can be lifted and moved with little effort or moved by the wheels on its legs.
Researching our high chair online, I discovered several examples of the exact (or close to exact) model in antique stores, auctions sites and within museum collections. But none, including ours, have any surviving marking or labels, something that is commonplace for late Victorian American factory-made furniture. There is no way to say where this high chair came from. The biggest furniture manufacturing centers at the time were in Western New York, towns west of Boston, Cleveland and Cincinnati, Grand Rapids, Pennsylvania and Indianapolis. Looking closely at photos of these other examples and comparing them to our high chair, it is apparent that the design of the seatback is essentially the same. The different types of wood, either walnut or oak, the varied form of the caned inserts, and slight variations in the carving suggest that this model was produced at several different factories. There likely was a template or sketch used by multiple factories in America. I browsed through Eastlake’s book and other furniture design books popular at the time and did not find a direct sketch of this chair, but there must have been some template because the details are just too close to each other not to have been. |
The main clue suggesting that the high chair was made in several factories is that all of the surviving examples have different original pressed cane seats and backs. “Pressed cane” was a technique invented in the 1870s where caned sheets were mass produced by mechanical looms. Some have caning that is blond in color, some have very tightly woven caning, some have loose hexagonal designs. Our high chair’s caned seat back has dark brown strands interwoven with golden brown. I consulted Kathy Tetro, a Sheffield expert on wicker furniture, about the chair and she commented that “the dual colors of the sheet appear to be original and are unusual and appealing.” Unfortunately, the seat back is irrevocably torn. Furthermore, the original matching seat bottom caned insert has been replaced with a wood plate with punched holes in it. You can still see the edges where the caning was cut out. I especially get a kick out of the fact that the seat replacement has very practical drainage holes!
As you’d expect, high chairs were subject to heightened wear and tear from toddlers. Collectors today actually favor a bit of imperfection as a mark that parts, paint and finishes are original. This model of high chair ranges in value from $100-$500 today. A consensus on antique furniture collector sites is that antique high chairs should not be used today. They just are not safe. Antique collectors recommend retrofitting antique high chairs following federal guides regulating modern high chair manufacturing. In fact high chairs, even with decades of safety regulations, continue to be a safety hazard to children. In the US between 2015-2016 there were 18,000 emergency room visits attributed to highchair accidents, most of which occurred from the child trying to climb into or out of it, or from chairs tipping over. In 2019 the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission high chair regulations were updated to mandate that they have three points of restraint and a piece in the seat to keep the child from slipping out.
Once the Dan Raymond House can be re-opened, I encourage you to come and view this high chair in person, and get a demonstration of how it can convert into a rocking chair. We have a small exhibit on the second floor, designed by our collections committee, containing several children’s chairs, strollers and cribs. |