In November 2022, I received a surprise telephone call from my cousin, Mr. Dain Perry. He said he and his wife, Constance, were downsizing and moving into a condominium. He told me he had a chair in which Commodore Matthew Perry had died and was wondering if I wanted it. He said it needed to be reupholstered. Sight unseen, I immediately said yes. Dain lived in Massachusetts, and I needed to get it moved to Rhode Island by the end of December. I was in Maryland, so I paid a local relative money to transport it to my home in Bristol, RI. 

In March, I traveled to RI and eagerly looked forward to seeing the chair. As Dain had described, it was in disrepair, but I felt the chair was too valuable as a family heirloom to do nothing. Fortunately, I have a very talented Bristol neighbor, Ms. Christine O’Connell, who does upholstery in her home. When she saw the chair, she immediately said she loved it and wanted to tackle the upholstery job. I told her I would remove all old material and all tacks, and then glue and repair wood in preparation.

I spent most of my two weeks in Bristol removing the old leather, stuffing, and thousands of tacks, which proved to be very laborious! Based on the number of old tacks I removed, it was obvious I was removing many tacks left in wood from previous upholsterers. I then glued and clamped all loose parts, re-stained exposed wood, and polished the solid brass plaque, on the front of the chair, and the four casters. I recorded many measurements and took over 100 pictures as Christine said she wanted to have good records of the original appearance.

While removing the old stuffing, I found a 1951 penny inside the chair, not on the outside. I speculated that it might have been placed there intentionally by a former person who upholstered the chair in 1951. Some old decoy carvers used to put a penny in hollow decoys from the year they made the decoy. The chair has been redone several times based on hundreds of holes and old tacks in wood, but no oral history was available about previous upholstery.

At the end of my RI trip, I notified Christine the chair was ready for her inspection. She was delighted with the job, and that same day she and her husband, Tom, showed up and carried the chair across the street to their home. Christine also took all the leather and stuffing material as reference material for her future work. She mentioned that a technique used on the back was no longer used in the United States, but she had been considering a trip to England to learn the technique.

Many questions remained in my head concerning the chair. The main issue was, how did this chair end up on my side of the family? Dain and I are descended from the Commodore’s brother, Captain Raymond Henry Jones Perry, and Commodore Perry had many direct descendants from his side of the family. Commodore Perry’s daughters married wealthy men, including in Tiffany and Belmont families. Descendants of women in these two families were very generous in the 1920s when many family artifacts of Commodore Perry’s were donated to museums. Two museums that have artifacts include the Tokyo National Museum and the U.S. Naval Academy Museum. It is possible the chair might have been offered to these museums and refused. It is possible that granddaughters of Commodore Perry offered the chair to their cousin, Bishop James DeWolf Perry, Dain’s grandfather during the 1920s when the elderly women were donating family heirlooms. Dain believes his father possessed the chair since at least 1947. Bishop Perry died in 1947, which would have been a logical time for the bishop’s son, DeWolf, to inherit the chair. Dain received the chair in 1975 in decent, but deteriorating shape. Eventually he reluctantly placed it in storage, until transfer to my house in 2022.

Another question I had was when and how did Commodore Perry obtain the chair. Because it has casters, he could have purchased it as an office chair for his home. It also could have been his favorite chair during one of his land assignments. A possible explanation offered by a friend of mine because of its rich navy-blue color, was that it could have been a gift that Perry obtained from the Naval Academy, after his successful expedition to Japan. Commodore Perry had been a major proponent of the Naval Academy that was created in 1845. I wrote to the Naval Academy Museum curator and my request for information was forwarded to a different department at the Academy. Unfortunately, I have received no response.

When I saw the dark color of the wood before preparation, I thought it might have been an oak, mahogany, or walnut. However, once I removed the upholstery, I realized the exposed wood was stained and unexposed was white in color with no obvious grain. It also was a very hard wood making tack removal difficult. Unfortunately, I could not identify the type of wood. I checked reference sources of wood used in chairs in the early 1800s but was unsure and hope experts can help me identify the wood type. Most people I talked to about the wood think it is most likely “rock” maple, based on the hardness and cream-white color.

Despite the numerous enquiries about the chair, I was unable to answer all the obvious questions about a chair that was used by a famous relative.  Maybe more answers will come forward as we proceed with the project and inform other relatives and friends about the chair.

The chair has now been upholstered by my neighbor upholsterer, Christine O’Connell. She was very deliberate in the upholstery process and used old hand sewn techniques which are more artisan than modern upholstery techniques, which are less glamorous. To my surprise she even washed and replaced all the old horsehair, which was probably the original stuffing and still in great condition. Christine and Tom delivered the chair across the street to my house in the spring of 2025. The chair has received much interest and many compliments. It has also been sat in by visiting friends including the Consul General of Japan in Boston, Takahashi Seiichiro.