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CHAPTER V. 
CHAIRS. 
CHAIRS were very scarce in early colonial times. 
Only fifty-six are mentioned in the first sixty-one 
inventories of Plymouth, Mass., made from 1633 to 
1654, and but one hundred in the first seventy-nine 
inventories, from  1639 to 1653, in Boston.  The 
inventories of the first fifty-six householders of New 
Haven, Conn., recorded from 1647 to 1662, show 
one hundred and forty-six chairs, while only one 
hundred and fifty are found among the chattels of 
the first seventy-five householders of Hartford, Conn., 
from 1641 to 1659. 
In many of these inventories no chairs at all are 
mentioned, while in others the number much exceeds 
the average, ranging from six to twenty-four. 
This scarcity of chairs was not mainly due to dis- 
tant migration, pioneer life, and lack of wealth, but 
rather to the use of stools and forms for seats, a cus- 
tom which the colonists had brought from the mother 
country. In England stools and forms were yet in 
common use, and chairs, which during the sixteenth 
century had been very scarce, did not become at all 
abundant till after the Commonwealth.