Just My Size: Antique Children's Furniture Exhibit

Gerri and Morgan MacWhinnie bought their circa-1790 Southampton home nearly 40 years ago, and they’ve been filling it with antiques ever since.

“Morgan and I have been married for 53 years, and from day one, we started collecting,” Ms. MacWhinnie said during an interview last week at the Southampton Historical Museum.

But the MacWhinnie antiques collection is slightly different from most because, at one point, it was driven by the need to furnish their home for their ever-growing family.

“We had four babies in five years, and we just fell in love with old children’s furniture,” she said. “They were well used before we got them, and then they were used again.”

The couple’s four children—Scott, Kenneth, Kerry and Inez—picked out their favorites among the child-sized furniture. The boys loved their captain’s chair from the 1880s. Inez fell for a red-stained, pine blanket chest featuring a single-arch molding, which suggests an early date of between 1720 and 1740.

Over the years, the MacWhinnies’s passion hasn’t ebbed. It’s even sparked a similar fondness in their grandson, Kory­­—Kerry’s son..

“We used to have a small, child-sized wing chair. It was really precious, red leather,” Ms. MacWhinnie said, noting that it has since sold in her husband’s Southampton-based shop, Morgan MacWhinnie Antiques. “My grandson, who is now 23—he was about 3 years old—saw it one day and said, ‘Oh! Just my size.’”

And so, the idea for the Southampton Historical Museum’s newest exhibit, “Just My Size: Children’s Furniture from the Past,” was born—an idea that Ms. MacWhinnie, the museum’s newly elected president, has

sat on for 20 years and, on Tuesday, May 15, will watch come to life. The show will feature 24 pieces from her own collection.

“The MacWhinnies are amazing collectors,” Tom Edmonds, executive director of the museum, said during an interview last week. “It’s wild. Inside their house, they don’t have a chair by the window; they have three chairs—an old chair, an older chair and a newer chair. Nobody collects like they do.”

All of the children’s furniture—whether it’s chairs, dressers or chests—exist in an adult size, the curator explained, but were then adapted to meet a toddler’s needs.

There isn’t much research to cite on child-size furniture, Ms. MacWhinnie said, but she believes that the chairs were used to help children settle down, take a seat, learn some manners and, ultimately, behave.

Most of the maple chairs that will be on display were family-made in New England by the children’s fathers or grandfathers, she said. She added that the furniture makers would then go on to build a small chest of drawers or blanket chest for the child, such as the one little Inez used.

“This is a particularly fine example of a wonderful, early blanket chest for a child. Most of the blanket chests are this high and this wide,” Ms. MacWhinnie said, holding her arms out at about double the length and height of the chest. “So it’s obviously child-sized. And somebody took a moment to make it architecturally fine with this design and arch molding.”

All of the furniture in the exhibit dates from the early 1700s to the early 1900s. And as it turns out, much of the remaining child-size pieces happen to be chairs, Ms. MacWhinnie said.

The oldest pair of chairs in the exhibit is the circa-1740 ladder-backs—named for the horizontal slats between the two uprights—with rush seats and mushroom knobs at the front end of the arms.

“If you look very carefully, they call this grain paint,” Ms. MacWhinnie said, holding up one of the chairs. “The paint is made to look like a piece of fine wood that has graining in it, so they duplicate it by paint. Then they stenciled it. And I just love the little mushrooms. We own some adult-sized mushroom chairs. You sit in them and it’s just a great place to put your hand.”

The second floor of the Rogers Mansion will be filled with a number of other varieties of chairs: circa-1760 banister-back chairs; a corner chair from 1790; a circa-1800 Windsor-style, bow-back chair; a step-down potty chair from the early 1800s; and a captain’s chair from the 1880s.

“In the adult size of a captain’s chair, they were referred to as ‘firehouse Windsors,’ and there would be dozens of them in a firehouse,” Ms. MacWhinnie said. “Then they started showing up as children’s chairs.”

In the 1840s, upholstered French empire Bergere-inspired chairs, also known as “shepherdess chairs,” also began appearing in child-size form.

“These are one-of-a-kind things. Children’s furniture just didn’t last, especially a chair like this,” Mr. Edmonds said, gesturing to the small, blue-clothed chair. “You can imagine the amount of spit-up that would be on this thing.”

“Yeah, that’s unusual,” Ms. MacWhinnie said. “It’s very unusual to see something like that for a child. It’s quite rare.”

“They’re also rare because people had lots of children—14 children in one family was not unheard of in the 19th century,” Mr. Edmonds said. “Each child, over the years, broke them. 
They didn’t last long. Children’s furniture is especially rare. This is a very interesting bit of history.”

“Just My Size: Children’s Furniture from the Past” will open on Tuesday, May 15, at 11 a.m. at the Southampton Historical Museum. Tickets are $4 and free for members and children under 17. For more information, call 289-2494 or visit southamptonhistoricalmuseum.org.