Description:
Using a spring-lathe, a woodworker in Hadley, Hatfield or Deerfield, Massachusetts, turned the components of this great chair from tree-wet ash and joined them with round tenons to form the frame. A stylish icon of paternal authority when new, later generations came to view this sturdy chair as an old-fashioned relic. Probably in the mid-nineteenth century, a member of the Hawks family modified the frame and added rockers to the feet, converting it into an upholstered “make-do” rocking chair. When the modified chair fell into disuse, the upholstery was removed and the frame relegated to the attic of the Hawks family house in the Wapping section of Deerfield. The chair is important both as an example of seventeenth-century seating furniture made in the Connecticut River Valley of western Massachusetts that retains its original arm rests decorated with compound turnings, and for its history of adaptation to accommodate the changing tastes and needs of the Hawks family in which it descended. This chair relates to another turned great chair in HD's collection (95.042), probably made in Hatfield or Northampton for Samuel Edwards (1676-1749) of Northampton, also later modified as a rocking chair.

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https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2011.14.4

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