Tracking Down Waterford's History One Chair at a Time

By Eugene Scheel

Sunday, October 19, 2008

Forty years ago, I bartered a metal woodworking table for an old rocking chair. Norman Weatherholtz, owner of the chair and a longtime Waterford craftsman, told me the chair was a "Waterford rocker." It wasn't made for six-footers, but it had style.

Weatherholtz said there were two types of Waterford rockers and side chairs: Mounts and Houghs. He said I had a Mount because it had acorn finials atop the back supports. I'd never seen a Hough, so that was good enough for me.

Not so for Fred D. Johnson Jr. When he saw his first Waterford chair at an auction in the late 1970s, he wanted to know who had made it and when. He was intrigued that the chair was the first piece of American country furniture he had seen that was from a known location.

Through the years, at auction after auction, Johnson saw numerous Waterford chairs and rockers on the block. "They couldn't possibly be made by the same person or by two people," Johnson thought.

Photo: Eugene Scheel

Fred Johnson with a Waterford rocker made by John Mount around 1870.

His interest in the history of the Waterford chair led him on a quarter-century of meticulous research, which culminated in his writing the 2003 book, "Nineteenth Century Loudoun County, Virginia, Chair Manufacturing."

He told me how he probed U.S. Census data and examined records of the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts in Salem, N.C. He combed every available Loudoun newspaper and business directory before to 1900, looking for furniture advertisements. At auctions, he questioned buyers and sellers. In Waterford, resident and historian John Elbert Divine provided a personal touch, as he knew some of the furniture craftsmen in their later years.

I invited Johnson recently to join me at an old house that had four so-called Waterford side chairs and a Waterford rocker he had never seen. I wanted to see firsthand how he went about determining their origin. As we talked in the house's small parlor, he carefully measured and photographed each piece.

"Hickory was the main wood — hard as steel," he said.

He jotted down dimensions and details and scanned some notes and parts of his 2003 book. As he did so, I could sense the relationship between his avocation and his exacting profession: dentistry.

"They might have cost $1.25," Johnson said, referring to each side chair. "Just think. Someone had to turn 12 pieces of square wood on a foot-pedal-operated lathe to make one chair. That's why most chair makers advertised themselves as cabinet-makers or undertakers. It was more profitable to make rectilinear cabinets or coffins."

An hour later, he told me who had made the chairs, when and where — always with the caveats "attributed to" or "approximately," for he reminded me, "I wasn't there."

Photo: Eugene Scheel

William Henry Brown's furniture-making shop of the 1880s, near Hamilton.

He determined that three side chairs had been crafted by Charles K. Hough Jr. of Lovettsville in the 1880s. John Mount of Waterford had made one side chair around 1860 and the rocker around 1870.

Weatherholtz had been incorrect in saying that only a Mount had acorn finials. Johnson said many Loudoun furniture makers used that decoration atop the back supports of chairs, starting in the 1840s. By his count, Loudoun might have had as many as 94 furniture crafters from 1769 through the early 1900s. Although chairs were made in Waterford as early as 1818 and it was the center of the industry, there were many crafters throughout the county, especially in Hamilton and Lovettsville.

After his analysis of each chair in the parlor, Johnson affixed a small round sticker with the name of the likely maker and a number to the back support, just below the seat so it would not be readily visible. His pedigrees now grace about 900 chairs that various people have asked him to examine.

A breakthrough leading him to write the book came at a spring auction near Hamilton in 1991. Before the auction, he noticed a Waterford chair. A man said, "My grandfather made that chair." The man then led Johnson to the former shop of William Henry Brown, where unused parts of chairs were lying about, undisturbed for a century.

The small brick factory, its lathe once powered by a windmill, was the first furniture-making shop Johnson had seen. And he noticed that the front-leg assemblies matched those of Mount and his son, William T. Mount.

"The sections even had scribe marks of the Mounts," Johnson told me. "Seeing the parts lying there taught me exactly how the chair was put together. Brown might have learned the trade from the [Mount] father and son, and then, when the son left for Nebraska in 1882, Brown may have bought the parts."

Scribe marks on the chair back posts and legs determined placement of stretchers or slats. As a general rule, the more scribe marks, the older the chair.

John Mount's placement of scribe marks was as "if they were machine-made. He was a true perfectionist. Everything had to be just right," Johnson said.

Mount was a craftsman others tried to emulate. He made furniture from about 1826 to 1876. Johnson, who has documented more than 300 of his chairs, said, "He pretty much had a lock on the trade in western Loudoun County."

Mount's 1876 obituary in the Leesburg newspaper the Mirror noted that his "scrupulous honesty of workmanship and his unflagging zeal had given him a reputation extending far beyond his own State. . . . He clung tenaciously to the old landmarks, and thus denied himself the rich harvest open to him in the use of more modern improvements in his favorite work."

Johnson places the year Mount died as the beginning of modern improvements to furniture manufacturing. At industrial exhibitions celebrating the nation's centennial, the machinery to mass-produce furniture was on view. It would soon be operative. By 1893, Sears and Roebuck catalogues advertising machine-made furniture were reaching rural America. The John Mounts could not compete.

I closed my lengthy conversation with Johnson by asking him, "What about other counties — say, Fauquier, Culpeper, Rappahannock? Did they have their 19th-century chair makers?"

"Absolutely," Johnson replied.

But they need a Fred Johnson to document their heritage of handmade Americana.

Johnson's book can be bought at the Loudoun Museum and Thomas Balch Library in Leesburg or at the Waterford Foundation. The foundation houses an exhibit of Loudoun chairs donated by Johnson, which can be viewed by appointment by calling 540-882-3018. Johnson will document Loudoun-made American country furniture at no charge. He can be reached at 703-430-6267 or chairguyfred@verizon.net.

Eugene Scheel is a historian and mapmaker who lives in Waterford.

Tagged: opinions, Waterford

Your Thoughts...

Are you happy that the school year is over?