Side Chair
Walter Corey (American, active ca. 1836–75)
The fashion for graining furniture to imitate rosewood arose in the 1820s. This chair, which was made in an era when the American furniture-making trades were radically changing, was the product of the prolific chair factory that Walter Corey established in Portland, Maine, in 1836. Corey eventually built his business into a large furniture factory, six stories high, with machinery run by a sixty-horse-power engine, and employed more than one hundred men.