The Hundred-Year Chair · a chapter

What We Leave

My mother lives in assisted living at Beaumont, a retirement community in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her room was once a bedroom in the Austin Mansion, built in 1912 for William Austin, a president of the Baldwin Locomotive Works.

During a visit, we talked about a little table she likes. It has a six-sided top and a busy arrangement of slender members beneath it, with little wooden balls along the spindles. I would not have singled it out for the quality of its construction. But my mother remembered dusting it as a child in Sugar City, Idaho, and her mother had dusted the same table as a child in Teton.

My grandmother was born in 1906. Even allowing her to be fourteen when she dusted it, the table was in use by about 1920. It had already cleared the hundred-year bar I had set for my chairs, without attracting my attention as a particularly fine piece of furniture.

The table had belonged to my great-great-grandmother, Emma Jackson Siddoway. She liked ordering things from catalogs, and the table may have been one of those purchases. My mother knew whose it was; I did not. After our conversation I wrote an account that assigned it to the wrong ancestor. My mother read it and sent an email straightening out the owners and generations. I had managed to lose track of the story while the person who knew it was still available to explain.

The repeated names did not help. My great-grandmother Alice Harries Siddoway had a daughter also named Alice, who became my grandmother. There were two Alices to keep straight, neither of them the Emma who had owned the table. I could correct the account with my mother's help. I wondered how my children would fare without it. Nothing about the table's continued usefulness depended on their knowing any of these names.

My mother had done something about that problem with another object she loves. An embroidery made by her grandmother, the older Alice, shows a fireplace, a kettle, and two chairs. Below the picture is an invitation to come in after a day's work. When my mother inherited it, she added her grandmother's name and life dates in blue thread along the bottom: Alice Siddoway, 1875 to 1940.

The blue lettering is smaller than the verse above it. It fits in the space between the last line and the edge of the fabric, where someone looking at the embroidery can read it. My mother had not needed to make a separate label and hope it stayed with the frame. She had stitched the information into the work itself.

There was more about Alice's family in a family-history book: a photograph of a house, a list of children, dates beside their names. The embroidery could not carry all of that, but it now gave a later owner somewhere to start. I could do something similar for the table by writing down what my mother had told me. I could not make my children feel what she felt about either object. At least they would have a chance to know whose things they were before deciding what to do with them.

My mother had also, years earlier, given me the book that led to my own mark. It was a Christmas present, Scott Kim's Inversions: A Catalog of Calligraphic Cartwheels. Among its arrangements of letters are words that can be turned upside down and still read the same. The letters have to serve twice: a stroke that belongs to the beginning of the word becomes part of its end when you rotate the page. I loved the puzzle of it.

I have been making these ambigrams ever since, which I recommend to anyone as the finest defense I know against a boring conference call. I start with a pen in a notebook and move to Illustrator when something half-works. I have made them for everyone in my family and for a good many friends, always as a gift. The one I made for myself in the 1980s is lost. The one on this page is dated December 29, 2009, made over a holiday snowed into a house in Park City, Utah.

When I began considering a maker's mark for the chair, I already had one I liked. There is vanity in wanting to leave a mark, as well as the ordinary pleasure of saying I made this. I had spent enough time on the chairs to want my name on one. But the little table and the embroidery made me think about how little my mark would tell a later owner. It would identify my contribution. It would say nothing about the people who lived with the chair afterward.

My father's screw and my maple bracket had become part of the rocker's history. A future repairer of my chair might have the same questions I had faced: was this piece original, why was it changed, what had the person before me been trying to fix? I would like to leave room for the answers, including ones I could not yet supply.

For the thousand-year chair, I had been considering what I called a "ship's bell": a durable piece carrying identity and essential information even as other parts were renewed. I imagined a record of the chair's design surviving a succession of cushions, finishes, and repairs. I had considered a compartment beneath the seat with a bronze sliding door, or a bronze tube containing parchment. I liked the tube but had not found a satisfactory place for it. The springs complicated the space beneath the seat.

There was also the question of what to put in it. The dimensions needed to reproduce a missing part were information I could prepare now. An account of a repair a century later would have to come from someone else. That person would need to find the record, understand that it was theirs to add to, and have some reasonably easy way of doing so. Even I, with tools and a fair amount of confidence using them, was daunted by the prospect of adding an inscription to bronze.

I had spent a good deal of time considering what might preserve a message. I had given less thought to what would make someone leave one. My mother had used blue thread. Perhaps I was making the chair's version unnecessarily difficult.

I kept thinking about a visit Wendy and I had made to the Tower of London in November 2025. Prisoners had carved names and other inscriptions into its walls. Centuries later, those marks were among the things visitors came to see. Usually I find graffiti an eyesore. Here I was interested in the people who had made it.

There was a furniture example too. The Coronation Chair at Westminster Abbey is oak, and its back carries names carved by schoolboys and visitors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those names had survived without a bronze information carrier. Of course, they had survived on the Coronation Chair. Its preservation was hardly a fair test of what would happen to an armchair in somebody's living room. Neither it nor the Tower could tell me how many other marks had been sanded away, painted over, or burned with the things they were on.

Still, I already planned to make the chair from oak. Before designing another bronze component, I could try leaving a name in the wood.

I had also considered putting a cumulative written record inside the upholstery. Someone renewing the cushion would encounter it, add a name, a date, and an account of the work, then put it back. That still seemed a useful place for a longer repair history. I would not want someone to have to take the chair apart just to learn the names of the people who had lived with it, though. There might be decades between those opportunities, with plenty of curious people sitting in the chair in the meantime.

I would rather put the names somewhere an ordinary user could find them by looking a little harder. Not across the front, competing with the chair, but perhaps on a main oak member visible from behind or below. One of the extra pieces that thickened a rail might offer a surface. I had not chosen it yet. I would need to try the lettering, decide how much space to leave, and check that making the marks would not damage a joint or weaken a member.

A less exposed face might spare the names some wear. It would not prevent a later owner from removing them. Someone could decide they were ugly, or sand them away while refinishing the chair. I could make that less likely by choosing the location carefully, but I could not reserve the surface for all time. Whoever owned the chair would have a say.

What appealed to me was the possibility that the marks would become part of living with it. A name noticed from behind might prompt a question. Someone who knew the answer could tell the story while there was still someone to tell it. The next owner might add a name nearby. I could invite that without specifying what every later person ought to write, or requiring them to regard my chair as a family treasure.

I still had to resolve the ship's bell. Names in the oak would not preserve a full drawing, and a paper record tucked into a cushion would need care of its own. The carved names might supplement those things rather than replace them. But they offered something I had not been getting from my plans for a protected compartment.

I would like to be able to show them to a child. We might have to crouch down or look around the back, but we should not need tools. There would be room beside my name for somebody else's.

A chapter of The Hundred-Year Chair, drafted and refined in public. The same text lives in the book; the interactive tools and the fully-sourced technical notes live here. home · the book · the technical notes · hundredyearchair.com