19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, May, 2003 by Michael Podmaniczky

In 1801 at the age of twenty-nine, Samuel Gragg arrived in Boston and began earning his living as a maker of "common" chairs. His name occasionally appeared in Boston tax records, and he frequently branded "S. GRAGG BOSTON" boldly on the bottoms of his conventional, bamboo style windsor chairs. He would have remained a known but obscure craftsman, were it not for a professional epiphany that can only be surmised by furniture scholars. This inspiration led him to be awarded, on August 31, 1808, a United States patent for what he officially referred to in the document as a bentwood "Elastic Chair" (see Pls. II, VII).

Information about Gragg's background is sketchy, most of it gleaned from a family geneology written by his father, Samuel Gregg (1739-1808). (1) Patricia E. Kane published the pertinent family information in 1971, (2) and in 1983 Nancy Goyne Evans added to the record when she discussed Gragg's place in the development of the Boston rocker. (3) Nonetheless, his early life remains stubbornly opaque.

Today, thanks to his elastic chairs, Samuel Gragg is a legend. No book on American seating furniture, painted fancy chairs, or bentwood construction is complete without an example of his work. Gragg is generally included in any discussion of internationally important bentwood furniture makers such as John Henry Belter (1804-1863) and Michael Thonet (1796-1871), both of whose most enduring designs postdate Gragg's by nearly half a century. In one fell swoop, Gragg not only introduced a revolutionary new process for building chairs with bentwood, he produced one of the the most dramatic interpretations of the classical style in the early nineteenth-century. United States. And although he was not a decorative painter, he chose and commissioned painted motifs for his chairs that anticipate aesthetic movement decoration by nearly three-quarters of a century. It would be difficult to ove rstate the level of innovation the elastic chair represents or the significance of Gragg as a designer, engineer, and maker in the history of American seating furniture.

Gragg was born in Peterborough, New Hampshire, on October 25, 1772. His father had learned the wheelwright's trade from his brother James, but according to Kane, the elder Samuel did not think much of wheel making and concentrated instead on farming. (4) However, the presumption that it is unlikely that Gregg trained Gragg in woodworking due to this indifference to wheel making requires further examination. "Farming" of course means much more than struggling behind a plow or swinging a scythe. In fact, both of these farm implements employ shaped, often bentwood elements. These wooden elements and a wide variety of other similarly shaped tool parts and farm necessities were commonly made on site. Given Gregg's training, it is virtually certain that he would have fabricated these implements himself, while offhandedly imparting his mechanical wisdom to the curious lad at his side. Gragg may well have left home with a solid grounding in mechanical woodworking skills, including the ability to make bent and otherw ise shaped wooden objects.

Gragg and his first wife, Lucinda Campbell, spent four or five years in upstate New York, presumably with his brother John who had settled there. After Lucinda's death, Samuel moved to Boston, married Elizabeth Hopkinson, and began a chairmaking business that eventually led to a partnership with William Hutchins. Not surprisingly for business partners at that time, Hutchins went on to marry Gragg's sister Betsy in 1806.

In 1808 Gragg received his "elastic chair" patent (P1. VII). In the same year, although there is no evidence of friction between the brothers-in-law and following two previous moves of their joint business, Gragg dissolved his partnership with Hutchins. He then announced in the Boston Independent Chronicle on February 25, 1808, that he had moved into the Furniture Warehouse, a tradesmen's cooperative located "near the bottom of the Mall" overlooking the south corner of Boston Common. (5) The Furniture Warehouse was owned by the English-trained Thomas Seymour (1771-1848), one of the most fashionable and successful makers of classically inspired furniture in Boston at the time. Outside of Gragg's newspaper announcement that he had moved to the Furniture Warehouse, there is no record of a professional, never mind a personal, relationship with Seymour. Nonetheless, his acquaintance with Seymour and presence in the Furniture Warehouse would have given Gragg intimate exposure to the elements of the classical style , which was so popular in Boston at the turn of the century.

Indeed, everywhere one turned among the style-conscious circles of Boston at the time, design elements appropriated from Roman, Greek, and Egyptian sources were manifest in wealthy residential interiors. Breaking with the rococo style that had preceded the American Revolution, consumers regarded classical designs as supportive of the new American republic, which itself was grounded in the classical republics of Greece and Rome. Urns, lyres, amphorae, and various repetitive border designs could be seen on the costly furniture, textiles, silver, and ceramics of great refinement imported into the bustling seaport of Boston from England and the Continent, as well as in the more limited range of furnishings provided by the local trades. The expense of imported goods would surely have signaled a market for any local entrepreneur who was prepared to seize the opportunity and produce objects of similar refinement and style. Seen in retrospect, Gragg's ingenuity provided fertile ground in which these ideas could grow and blossom.