Windsor-Chair Making in America: From Craft Shop to Consumer (review)

Nancy Evans, who for more than forty years has painstakingly researched the Windsor chair, a plank-seat, turned-leg chair form popular from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, has written another important volume on this American icon. Whereas her earlier books focused on the evolution of different types of Windsors, cataloged the regional variation of these types, and identified their makers in the colonial and early national periods, this most recent volume provides an in-depth discussion of the production, marketing, and use of these chairs. Drawing on a wealth of primary source material (including account books, census records, court and legal documents, diaries, and customs records), Evans seeks to recover the daily lives and business practices of the chair maker. She also makes the case for the Windsor chair as the most important furniture form in America during this period. Used in homes, businesses, public spaces, vehicles, and government agencies, Windsor chairs were an important proto-industrial object.

Evans breaks this weighty tome into five chapters: "The Craftsmen," "Facilities, Equipment, and Materials," "Construction and Design," "Marketing and Markets," and "The Role of Windsor Seating in American Life." Within these lengthy chapters she provides detailed descriptions of Windsor chair making and use, all well-documented by dense footnotes. Her meticulous listing of examples and her extensive citations (the fourth chapter on marketing consists of 119 pages of text and 291 footnotes) are the fruits of a lifetime of labor culling references to Windsor chairs from manuscripts and published sources. Her command of the seating type can be seen in her inventory of locations where they were found or her ability to offer a "reasonable composite" of costs and profits (pp. 128–29).

Yet the documentary strength of the volume is also its weakness. There is scant analysis of the descriptive material. For example, after giving a general description of the types of craftsmen and shops, she offers little interpretation as to the differences over time or between regions and locations. Missing is a synchronic and diachronic sense of the temporal topography of chair making and the relationship of this craft activity to other forms of artisanal enterprise. It is curious that at no time does Evans address the notion of "crafting capitalism," to borrow the phrase used by Donna Rilling, or question what a "journeyman" might be at different times or in different places. Also not addressed specifically are the reasons why certain organizational structures prevailed: familial labor vs. regional networks vs. industrial capitalist. Changes in the production system are presented as inevitable evolution rather than as contested, irregular developments. Complexity and fluctuations are not fully accounted for in the chapter on marketing. Furthermore, Evans never really engages with the links between production and consumption—was one driving the other? Are there other explanatory models for the expansion of supply and demand?

This volume seems geared to a specialized audience of myopic furniture historians rather than a broader audience of interdisciplinary scholars interested in labor, technological, or cultural history. It is a book more in keeping with a more traditional account of the decorative arts, such as Ledlie Laughlin's Pewter in America (1940), than a work that engages in material culture, such as Adrienne Hood's The Weaver's Craft (2004).

Also questionable is the decision to end the book in the mid-nineteenth century, when according to Evans "innovation had run its course" and factory production had taken over. Such a romantic Arts and Crafts notion overlooks the fact that Windsors were produced in specialized shops taking advantage of the latest technological means (both mechanical and human) and that Windsors continued to be used in similar ways as seats for business offices, schools, and libraries as well as in domestic spaces. In the twentieth century Windsors also became a charged symbol of the preindustrial age, as seen in the work of Wallace Nutting and Thomas Moser. Today contemporary makers...