A hundred years of the same chair
The shape has not changed since 1903. Everything else has.
- 1903 Thomas Lee builds the first one from eleven boards on a hillside in Westport, New York.
- 1905 Harry Bunnell patents it as the Westport chair and builds them in hemlock for twenty years.
- 1920s Hotels and camps across the Adirondacks and, in Canada, the Muskoka lakes, line their lawns and docks with them.
- 1930s The single plank back gives way to slats; the fan back appears. The name settles on the mountains.
- 1950s The post-war cottage boom. Cedar, pine and paint. Every dock in Ontario has two.
- 1980s The deck boom. Big-box stores sell cedar kits by the thousand. Most are grey within three years.
- Late 1980s The first recycled-plastic lumber. Soft, fades, but it does not rot.
- 1990s Pigment-through, UV-stabilised HDPE boards. The recycled chair becomes the one that lasts.
- 2010s Stainless hardware and denser boards become standard among the good makers. The chair goes online.
- 2017 Greens.ly starts, with the idea of keeping plastic out of landfill by turning it into something nobody throws away.
- Now One chair, fourteen colors, built to order in Texas from about five hundred milk jugs, delivered free.