Rocking through the Ages
Barbara Hartsfield’s (M.S.N. ’92) house in Stone Mountain Village sits along Main Street, a quaint thoroughfare lined with one-of-a-kind shops and boutiques catering to visitors looking for arts, crafts, fashions and antiques.
Visitors to her house, however, find something quite unique — a world-record display of whimsical miniature chairs.
“I didn’t plan to have this as a museum,” said Hartsfield, curator of the Collectible and Antique Chair Gallery and a collector of more than 3,000 miniature chairs of every shape, theme and description. “All I did was shop for fun, but I kind of fell into it.”
Hartsfield, a semi-retired psychiatric nurse at Grady Memorial Hospital, said her love of miniature chairs started more than a decade ago when she wanted to write an article about pregnant psychiatric patients.
But in order to get started, she had to get into the mood to write. She thought of babies, and then the chairs used to gently rock babies to sleep. So, she started collecting a few.
Those few would lead her to gather more and more, and ever since she’s been on the hunt for tiny chairs. She’s found everything from chairs made out of horseshoes to chair-shaped inkwells.
One set of chairs was created out of popsicle sticks and placed into gallon-sized bottles.
“Now, how anyone got them in there, I’m not sure,” she said. “Someone might have had special tools and worked from the top, or they might have put them in the bottle and sealed it back.”