The fashionable frontier: Thomas Ramsey, windsor-chair maker in Marietta, Ohio

Magazine Antiques, May, 2004 by Andrew Richmond

As the eighteenth century drew to a close, Thomas Ramsey, like thousands more, saw the newly formed Northwest Territory as a prime opportunity to make his fortune. Life in Pittsburgh had been good to the young chairmaker. The new city had a fast-growing furniture industry that had allowed him and his partner, William Davis, to specialize in the production of windsor chairs (see Pl. VII). By about 1800, however, the pull westward was too strong for Ramsey to resist any longer. He made plans to make the weeklong journey by flatboat down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh to Marietta, in Washington County, Ohio.

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A group of New Englanders, who called themselves the Ohio Company of Associates, had established Marietta in 1788 as the first organized settlement in the Northwest Territory. During its early years, the frontier community had been plagued by floods, exceedingly difficult agricultural conditions, a smallpox epidemic, and worst of all, hostile Indians. An attack on an outlying settlement in January 1791 had prompted more than four years of conflict with the local Delawares and Wyandots.

Despite these early difficulties, the settlers strove to fill their frontier houses with stylish objects. After all, the majority of the members of the Ohio Company, including the director, General Rufus Putnam (see Fig. 3), were educated, cultured, and affluent. Like Putnam, many were from prominent New England families and had served as officers in the American Revolution. They had no intentions of conforming to frontier stereotypes by living in primitive log cabins and wearing buckskin clothing.

With this in mind, the Ohio Company had chosen an ideal spot on which to build a settlement--at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum rivers in the southeastern corner of the Northwest Territory. The Muskingum provided easy transport of goods from inland to the Ohio, and the Ohio allowed easy access upriver to western Pennsylvania and down-river to Cincinnati and beyond to the Mississippi River and, eventually, to the Gulf of Mexico. The Ohio Company planned a settlement that could harness the economic power of the Ohio River and become a gateway to all future western expansion.

War with the Indians had initially hindered such grandiose plans, but after the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, residents of Marietta redoubled their efforts to use the river as the foundation for a strong economy. The river provided access to new markets, allowing local farmers and small manufacturers to expand their operations beyond subsistence. In 1800 the master shipbuilder Stephen Devol (1745-1803) of Marietta set out to capitalize on this by building ocean-going vessels that allowed larger-scale trading throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, and as a result, the river-based economy surged. Despite the shipbuilding industry's short life in Marietta (it ended following the Embargo Act of 1807), it helped establish the town as an important hub in the lucrative Ohio River trade network. (1)

Thus, the opening of the nineteenth century was an auspicious time for Ramsey's move downriver--memories of the lean early years of the settlement were being replaced by visions of a prosperous future. Residents of Marietta, both the transplanted New Englanders and the growing numbers of Pennsylvanians and Virginians who were part of the postwar wave of immigration, were investing large sums of money in more spacious houses, and they wanted these houses fashionably furnished. The river trade allowed consumers to acquire house-hold goods easily and cheaply from Pittsburgh, as well as larger cities in the East, primarily Philadelphia. Local merchants made regular buying trips to Philadelphia to purchase the goods their customers needed and wanted, such as salt, silk, velvet, buttons, books, and pewter. (2) Local newspapers advertised merchandise "just received from Baltimore and Philadelphia" and "suited to the present and approaching seasons." (3)

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While in Pittsburgh, Ramsey was probably aware of the constant shipment of goods to Marietta and surmised that the residents of the growing town had money to spend on furnishing their houses. It seemed a prime opportunity, so sometime between 1800 and 1803, he packed up his tools and his young family and headed down-river, settling in Marietta's commercial center, called the Point, where the two rivers converge (see Pl. II). (4)

Upon his arrival, Ramsey quickly integrated himself into the growing artisan community. Little furniture, other than basic storage forms such as chests, seems to have come west with the settlers, and there is little evidence suggesting that significant quantities of furniture were imported, except by a few wealthy individuals. Although Augustus Stone (1780-1879), a chairmaker and retailer in Harmar (just across the Muskingum from the Point), advertised "Windsor Chairs from Pittsburgh, which are of superior quality," in 1822, (5) most residents, even very early, relied upon the numerous craftsmen already supplying the region with furniture. Between 1800 and 1810 there were at least ten cabinet- and chairmakers in Washington County, serving a population of fewer than six thousand residents. (6) The daybook kept by Joshua Shipman (1767-1823), a cabinetmaker, records a brisk business between 1796 and 1803. For example, between late 1796 and 1799 he produced seventy-three pieces of furniture, including breakfast tables, dining tables, candlestands, chests of drawers, desks, clothes-presses, and chairs. (7)