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The Bump Chair
Written By: Jane Gibson Nardy - Cashiers Historical Society | Issue: 2016/05 - May
When you do genealogical research on a family, studying records of ancestors through several generations, you may think you’ve come to a stopping point with a large collection of birth, marriage and death proof but the truth is that years after your active research has ceased, new evidence often shows up – seemingly out of the blue.
That happened in early 2016, when I was contacted by Bill Fryar, a direct descendant of Mordecai Zachary through Mordecai’s eighth child, David Mordecai Zachary.
In 2009, Fryar gave Mordecai and Elvira Zachary’s Bible to the Cashiers Historical Society and that Bible is carefully kept under glass in the “new room” at the Zachary-Tolbert House in Cashiers.
Now, here in 2016, was Bill Fryar and his wife Mary Alice, with another 1800s-era wonderful donation – a “Bump Chair” which had been lovingly sat in an uncountable number of times while Amanda Carver Zachary burped her 10 children after nursing them. In 1921, Amanda, wife of David Mordecai Zachary, died young, leaving many of her children too young to care for themselves and when father David died just two years later of a ruptured appendix the two eldest daughters, Kate and Anne, raised their younger siblings and filled the parent role more than the sibling role.
The Bump Chair, which could be called a rocking chair without rockers, stayed in the family of David Mordecai Zachary through the years until in 1981 it was given to Bill and Mary Alice Fryar by Elsie Mona Zachary Fryar Severance. The only change in the chair and footstool is the replacement of the worn-out seats. There is obvious wear on the bottoms of the four short chair legs caused by the rocking back and forth while the baby was being patted on the back and urged to burp.
Hopefully, the Bump Chair will be on display in the Zachary-Tolbert House before the end of this summer. If only furniture could talk, this Bump Chair would…Burp!
