Was circa 1900 wooden rocker a mail-order gem?
QI inherited this chair from my grandparents. I believe they purchased it at auction in Texas in the 1970s. It is a wooden rocker that’s reddish in color. I hope you’ll be able to investigate it.
AIt’s very possible that a homeowner purchased this chair through a mail-order catalog. Sears and Montgomery Ward were the Amazons of yesteryear. A whole host of products — from wagon wheels to pocket watches — were available at a variety of prices to anyone at any time. The combination of a growing population and geographic expansion meant that these products had to be efficiently and frugally produced in huge numbers.
Your rocker is the embodiment of a whole host of these design, manufacturing and marketing ideals. It’s a perfect example of how industrial innovations democratized the furniture industry and how these advances allowed homeowners to choose from an amalgam of styles when decorating their interiors. I’d call your chair a die-stamped, spindle-back platform rocker on casters and date it to just around 1900.
Let’s start at the bottom. Your rocker rests on “improved” swivel casters patented by inventor David A. Fisher in 1876. Fisher designed these casters to make moving furniture along assembly lines safer and faster, thus lowering labor costs. Casters caught on with retail customers who then could easily move furniture around a room.
And moving furniture around a room brings us to the platform base of your rocker. Traditional rocking chairs require a lot of space and they tend to gravitate across floors. Platform rockers, developed in the mid- to late 19th century, attached rockers by springs to a stationary base. These immensely popular chairs took up less space, stayed put and never ran over the cat’s tail.
The overall look of your rocker was a contemporary interpretation of earlier furniture styles. While the spindle-turned lathe back calls to mind Windsor chairs of a century and a half earlier, it’s the Gothic Revival lion’s head crest rail that is your chair’s most modern feature.
At about the same time swivel casters and platform rockers were being patented, the steel diestamp was adopted in the industry. A design was cut into a metal stamp, and then the stamp was pressed along pre-cut furniture elements, leaving the design imprinted on the wood. This allowed furniture makers to mimic expensive hand-carving.
Marketers of the day often used words like “fancy,” “showy” and “hand-polished,” sometimes implying that these mass-produced chairs featured more individual craftsmanship than they had. Nevertheless, pressback furniture was immensely popular well into the 1930s.
When new, your chair would have retailed for $2 or $3. The current value depends on the condition and the detail of the design. Your rocker could sell in the $200 range in today’s market.