A Brewster Chair is a style of
turned chair made in mid-17th-century
New England
New England is a region consisting of six states in the Northeastern United States: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. It is bordered by the state of New York (state), New York to the west and by the ...
.
Origin
The "Brewster Chair" was named after
William Brewster, one of the
Pilgrim
The asterisk ( ), from Late Latin , from Ancient Greek , , "little star", is a typographical symbol. It is so called because it resembles a conventional image of a heraldic star.
Computer scientists and mathematicians often vocalize it as ...
fathers who landed in
Plymouth, Massachusetts
Plymouth ( ; historically also spelled as Plimouth and Plimoth) is a town in and the county seat of Plymouth County, Massachusetts, United States. Located in Greater Boston, the town holds a place of great prominence in American history, folklor ...
in 1620. In 1830, the Brewster family of Duxbury donated Elder Brewster's original chair to
Pilgrim Hall Museum
The Pilgrim Hall Museum at 75 Court Street in Plymouth, Massachusetts is the oldest public museum in the United States in continuous operation, having opened in 1824.
History
The Pilgrim Society, established in 1820, runs the museum. The museum ...
in Plymouth, where it remains today. His chair was created in New England between 1630 and 1660 of American
white ash. Other similar New England chairs from the 17th century have been named after this piece.
In the 1970s, Rhode Island sculptor
Armand LaMontagne produced a notorious fake Brewster Chair that fooled the national experts at the
Henry Ford Museum
The Henry Ford (also known as the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation and Greenfield Village, and as the Edison Institute) is a history museum complex in Dearborn, Michigan, United States, within Metro Detroit. The museum collection contai ...
, which acquired the piece.
References
External links
Original Brewster Chair at the Pilgrim Hall Museum"Furniture of the Pilgrim Century" by Wallace Nutting (Marshall Jones: Boston, 1921) pg 182-184
(Google Books search)
Chairs
Massachusetts culture
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