"A drawing Table & a round table, £1.18s. A cubberd & 2 long formes, 14s. A cubberd cloth & cushions, 13s.; 4 setwork cushions, 12s. £1.5. 6 greene cushions, 12s; a greate chaire with needleworke, 13s. £1.5. 2 high chaires set work, 20s; 4 high stooles set worke, 26s 8d £6.6.8. 4 low chaires set worke, 6s 8d, £1.6.8. 2 low stooles set worke, 10s. 2 Turkey Carpette, £2; 6 high joyne stooles, 6s. £2.6. A pewter cistern & candlestick, 4s. A pr of great brass Andirons, 12s. A pr of small Andirons, 6s 8d. A pr of doggs, 2s 6d. A pr of tongues fire pan & bellowes, 7s."
Now, this was a very liberally furnished living-room. There were plenty of seats for diners and loungers, if Puritans ever lounged; two long forms and a dozen stools of various heights, with green or embroidered cushions, upon which to sit while at the Governor's board; and seven chairs, gay with needlework covers, to draw around his fireplace with its shining paraphernalia of various sized andirons, tongs, and bellows. The low, heavy-raftered room with these plentiful seats, the tables with their Turkey covers, the picturesque cupboard with its rich cloth, and its display of the Governor's silver plate, all aglow with the light of a great wood fire, make a pretty picture of comfortable simplicity, pleasant of contemplation in our bric-a-brac filled days, a fit setting for the figures of the Governor, "New England's glory full of warmth and light," and his dearest, greatest, best of temporal enjoyments, his "vertuous, prudent and prayerful wife."
Contemporary inventories make more clear and more positive still this picture of a planter's home-room, for similar furniture is found in all. All the halls had cisterns for water or for wine (and I fancy they stood on the small table usually mentioned); all had a table for serving meals; a majority had the cupboard; a few had "picktures" or "lookeing glasses;" very rarely a couch or "day-bed" was seen; some had "lanthorns" as well as candlesticks; others a spinning-wheel for the good wife, when she "keepit close the house and birlit at the wheel."
Chairs were a comparatively rare form of furniture in New England in early colonial days, nor were they frequently seen in humble English homes of that date. Stools and forms were the common seats. Turned, wainscot, and covered chairs are the three distinct types mentioned in the seventeenth century. Turned chairs are shown in good examples in what are known as the Carver and Brewster chairs, now preserved in Pilgrim Hall in Plymouth. The president's chair at Harvard College is another ancient turned chair.