The Roadshow was in Baltimore yesterday and the wife managed to wrangle us a couple of tickets. It's something we promised ourselves we'd do, given a chance, so we gathered up a few items of curiosity and headed down there. A ring my grandfather gave me was worth not much more than its gold content (although sentimentally off the charts), the "silver" charm of the wife's was actually base-metal and near worthless, and the seal-shaped ocarina turned out to be a tourist tchotchke of relatively recent vintage from Peru or Ecuador.

The main thing I wanted to learn more about was a Windsor chair I got at an estate sale some five or six years ago. It was a cash-n-carry item from the end of the sale, a piece that no one had bid on and the auction staff offered at best offer. For twenty bucks I walked away with two chairs, this one and a sixty year-old Hitchcock side chair that now finds use at my desk.

The auction guy had told me he didn't know anything about the chair's history, but that its construction had characteristics of chairs made in the late 18th century. Because of this, my children referred to it as the George Washington chair, since theoretically Washington was still alive at the time of its construction and who knows, maybe he sat on it.

So off to the Roadshow, schlepping this old chair. I was directed to the "Furniture" tent, where I was introduced to Andrew Holter, one of the furniture experts on the program. He asked what I knew about the chair, where I lived, and where I'd gotten it. I told him the story, to which he said "Well, I think you missed George by just a few years." He said the chair, given it's style and materials, was definitely made in Rhode Island 1800-1810 (Washington died in 1799). He said it was in good shape, one of the best he'd seen in awhile. From a value standpoint, the chair has some problems. It was originally painted, not stained (he showed me traces of paint on the undeside of the seat and on the legs), so that fact that someone had refinished it killed its collector value. Still, in its current condition, worth $150-$200. Fifteen years ago, he said the value would have been $1500-$2500, but sadly nobody wants this type of furniture anymore. If it still had the original gray paint, probably six figures. No matter, the value was unimportant to me...I just wanted validation that it's a really old American chair.

So we'll refer to it as the John Adams chair (he lived until 1826 and was from New England). I'm good with that.