Mrs. Blair & the Turkey-work Chair

 

The chair pictured in 1891.

The Turkey-work chair sat in the parlor of a house that overlooked the Connecticut River. In the winter when the river froze, the boy who grew up in the house with the chair liked to skate back and forth under the bridges. 

His name was Henry. He knew by heart the cotton mills and iron foundries that hummed and clanged along the riverbank.  

After the Civil War, the town of West Springfield, Mass. would become even more industrialized, but when Henry bustled through the front door of his home, red-cheeked and dangling his skates, he returned to an earlier century.  

 

West Springfield, Mass., late nineteenth century

Perhaps he cast an eye toward the chair in the corner. His father and mother were protective of it, so they kept it out of the way.

The chair once belonged to Roger Williams, founder of the Rhode Island Colony and champion of religious freedom. Built around 1670, it had been passed down through several generations who didn’t have to apply for membership in the Daughters or Sons of the American Revolution. They were originals.

The boy’s father, also named Henry, was a dour bookbinder born in Hartford in 1831. He lived modestly with his second wife, Henrietta, and their son. The cupboards were filled with creamware and lusterware and the floors covered with hand-hooked rugs. Nobody thought of these things as antiques; they were just old family possessions with sentimental value.     

In his youth, the bookbinder caused his widowed mother plenty of headaches. He periodically disappeared and reappeared to announce he was heading to Pike’s Peak to strike gold or to New York City to try his hand at a new profession which he hadn’t yet determined.   

His mother believed that the devil’s workshop lay immediately beyond the borders of New England, and she was pleased when her son met and married Therese in 1853 and settled in West Springfield, where he started in the bookmaking field as an edge-gilder. 

The American Bookmaker was one of several trade journals
devoted to bookmaking during the nineteenth century.  

Soon after giving birth to a baby girl in 1860, Therese died. A few years later Henry remarried to Henrietta, one of Roger Williams’ descendants. That’s how the Turkey-work chair came to West Springfield.

Turkey-work chairs got their name from the upholstery used on the back and seat, a wool fabric loomed in England to resemble Turkish carpets.

The Roger Williams chair, carved from maple and oak, was stuffed with marsh-grass and covered with sackcloth. The floral upholstery had been attached with wrought-iron tacks. 

***

Eventually, the boy who liked to skate on the Connecticut River grew up and married, and he and his wife moved next door to his parents in 1890. (The arrangement did not please the young man’s elegant new wife, but she got back at him by fleeing to her family home in Syracuse, N.Y. as often as possible.)

The century turned and the unthinkable occurred—a world war. A few years after the 1918 Armistice, Henrietta died.

One day Henry received a letter from the president of the Rhode Island Historical Society, asking if he would consider donating Roger Williams’ Turkey-work chair to its collection.

Henry agreed that the gift made sense. He did not realize that the letter was a ploy. The man behind the request, a sneaky antiques dealer named Charles Woolsey Lyon, absconded with the chair to his shop in Manhattan and sold it in 1923.

 

This advertisement for Charles Woolsey Lyon's shop
appeared in Arts and Decoration in 1920. 

Henry, who died in 1925 at the age of ninety-four, probably did not know what became of the chair. In hindsight, the theft may have been a mixed blessing because the purchaser, Mrs. J. Insley Blair, ultimately bequeathed the chair to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it lives today.

Otherwise, who knows? The Turkey-work chair might have languished in West Springfield, lost in a fire or discarded by a descendant who did not understand its worth.

Natalie Blair, married to an heir to one of America’s first million-dollar fortunes, developed a passion for Early American antiques during the 1920s.

The Blairs lived in a 65-room mansion in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., an exclusive village in the lower Hudson River Valley, designed by the renowned architectural firm Carrere and Hastings. Natalie filled the large attic rooms with furniture and art organized by historical period.

The chair as it appears in American Furniture in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Frances Gruber Safford (2007).

She began lending pieces to the Metropolitan Museum when the American Wing was established in 1924. Bequests followed her death in 1951, at which time Roger Williams’ chair found its permanent home. 

Thirty short blocks and one long one from the antique shop of Charles Woolsey Lyon, a man whose sterling reputation hid at least one incident of deceit. 

And far from the house on the Connecticut River where the boy and his parents inhabited four centuries.  

 https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2021/12/mrs-blair-turkey-work-chair.html?m=1

A Syracuse Story

West Genesee Street, Syracuse, 1900

Jane looks out steadily, as if you hadn’t just surprised her by opening the case. She’s trapped in a daguerreotype, surrounded by a decorative brass mat. No rings yet adorn her fat fingers. It is 1860 and she is wearing a complicated day dress with ridiculous plaid puffs along the sleeves and a shawl and drooping headdress.

A scrap of paper is stuck to the velvet; faint message from the past:

PJ Bumblebee the hardest customer in Rochester City. He came to Oswego to ask consent. His courage failed. He finally concluded he would not marry at all.

Now it’s clear – she is waiting for the Bumblebee. 

PJ finally gets courage and she accepts. They move to Syracuse where he starts in men’s furnishings. He builds a fabulous shop with counter cases made of French plate glass and walnut. He employs tailors who work all night sewing Continental style suits. The business grows and PJ becomes a wealthy man.

Three daughters were born: Neeltje, Annabel, and Jessie. 

They didn’t come in a rush; 1864, 1870, 1877. PJ and Jane made sure that their daughters rose to the top of Syracuse society. There was a lot of money. The city’s economy flourished with the salt industry, banking, diverse manufacturing, and Syracuse’s development as a railroad center.

Debuts and balls, the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra, the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts,  summers at Saranac Lake, an expansive home on West Genesee Street . . . 

No wonder that Neeltje (known as Nellie), who married Henry Elmer of West Springfield, Mass., in 1890, brought her son and daughter to Syracuse for such protracted visits.

I just don’t understand how Henry and Nellie met. He hardly ever left his house, let alone West Springfield.

In the meantime, Annabel and Jessie married Syracuse men and continued to enjoy busy lives close by their parents. When PJ died in 1902, he knew they could afford lifetime upper-crust memberships. Their husbands prospered. It helped that they were well-launched by wealthy fathers.

Annabel married a man named William Buell Gere, the son of William Henry Harrison Gere who served in the New York State Legislature, worked as New York State Division Engineer, and made money in iron and salt.  

William B. Gere spent his career as the secretary and chief inventor of the Merrell-Soule Company, which developed a modern method for creating a powdered milk called Klim (milk spelled backwards). William B. Gere also led the invention of low-moisture canned mincemeat (“None Such”) and vegetable and soup powders, as well as new types of canning and food packaging. He held numerous patents, including one for pumpkin powder. He died prematurely in 1915. In 1927, Borden acquired Merrell-Soule.

Jessie married a man named Alfred Howlett Durston, Ph.B., Yale, 1899; class president. Son of James Franklin Durston, president of Lefever Arms Company, a Syracuse gun manufacturer best-known for its hammerless shotgun. Alfred worked in the factory and sales, and as secretary and vice president. He received a patent for a gun cleaner in 1902. It looks like Lefever produced automobile gears as a side business for some years. In 1916, the Durstons sold Lefever and reincorporated as the Durston Gear Corporation with Alfred as president, a position he held until his death in 1926.

And then there was “poor Nellie,” stuck in tiresome West Springfield with her in-laws living right next door on Main Street. Her husband Henry had attended the public schools and worked at a hardware store, then for Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. He obviously adored his hometown, serving as school trustee, town selectman, and treasurer of the West Springfield Co-operative Bank.

After Nellie died in 1926, he married Lilian. A schoolteacher, she had been a boarder in the Main Street house for some years. She lost her first fiancé in World War I.

Henry never made a lot of money or held a patent.

His glory days arrived while he served as treasurer of the town of West Springfield. 

During World War II, Henry defied New Deal fiscal guidelines for local governments yet managed to secure the town’s largest cash balance in 170 years. 

It’s family lore that The Wall St. Journal cited this achievement in an editorial, but no one has been able to confirm that.

See post 2/10/16

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/syracuse-calling.html?m=1

Well Jess you have got the best of everything

North End Bridge over the Connecticut River, seen from West Springfield, 1900

Jessie already seemed wise beyond her years by the time her brother was born. Their parents, Henry and Neeltje, were 40. The children had four grandparents, two great-grandparents, and a dozen aunts and uncles who had treated Jessie as an adult since she was small. 

When John came along in 1901, her maternal grandfather, Pieter John Brummelkamp, wrote to her from Syracuse:

My dear Jessie, What news did I hear. I must have dreamed it that you have a Brother. Am I right or wrong. If I am right then enclosed you will find a Bill. Go down the street and buy him a pair of boots and tell him to get up and shovel snow. If you haven’t any snow tell him to come to grand Pa, we have got plenty. Well Jess you have got the best of everything. It isn’t everybody that can have a Brother. Love to Ma & Pa, PJB

Two cities dominated the children’s early years: Syracuse, N.Y. and West Springfield, Mass. In both places Jessie came down from a long line of Jessies. Her mother’s mother, sister, and great-grandmother all were Jessies. Her father’s mother was a Jessie and his great-great-grandmothers both were named Jessie. 

This particular Jessie, born in 1894, would be the end of the line; married late, no children.

The families wore their homes like badges of honor, posing for photographs on Easter Sunday, the afternoon sun shining right into their eyes. 

In Syracuse, they composed themselves in lawn chairs with the photographer clear on the other side of West Genesee Street so that the figures are barely recognizable. 

In West Springfield, they sat under an enormous beech tree surely 200 years old.  

Jessie and John’s parents were not an obvious match. Neeltje thought West Springfield unfashionable and decamped each year for the social season in Syracuse where she stayed and stayed, often bringing the children with her. They moved between the sumptuous décor and service of the Brummelkamp home and rough-and-tumble West Springfield where John chopped down a dead apple tree, repaired a canoe, and fetched sugar from the A & P when they were down to two lbs. 

Neeltje was one of three beautiful daughters whose mother was one of five lovely daughters. PJ, a stocky immigrant from Utrecht, had business with Jane Brewster’s father and fell madly in love with her. 

After PJ and Jane married, he brought her to Syracuse where he built a successful men’s furnishings store. He ran it until 1883 when Governor Grover Cleveland appointed him superintendent of the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation.* In 1890 PJ was photographed “at camp” in the Adirondacks, wielding a fishing rod and dressed prematurely like a Rough Rider.

Onondaga Salt Springs, 1908

After PJ died in 1902, some thought that Henry and Neeltje might grow closer but that was not to be, for Neeltje spent even more time in Syracuse with her mother.

As Jessie later said of herself, she was “born raised” and largely brought up John. 

She enabled him to carve out a childhood. 

She insisted that her father take his son skating on the Connecticut River during the long frozen winters. 

She encouraged John to become manager of the high school baseball team and apply to Tufts because he hoped to be an engineer. 

She appreciated John’s enthralled interest in the future although her manner and views always marched resolutely out of the Victorian past.

*Jesuit missionaries first discovered salt springs around Onondaga Lake, about 6 miles northwest of Syracuse, in the mid-17^th century. Between 1797 and 1917, the Onondaga Salt Springs Reservation produced more than 11.5 million tons of finished salt.

See post 2/17/16

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2016/02/well-jess-you-have-got-best-of_10.html?m=1