Attached is a photograph of Montezuma Brother's favorite chair.

I inherited this chair from my father, Charles Melvin Ruller, who inherited it from his parents, W.T. Ruller and Ida Brothers, who inherited it from her parents, Montezuma Brothers and Hannah Cunningham.

I remember seeing my grandfather W.T. Ruller sitting in this old chair, at the end of his old farm kitchen table in their farm near Fergus. They never had indoor plumbing or electricity.

It became my Dad's favorite chair in his little house in Elora, on the property where I now live.

When my parents moved to Elmira, the old Elora house remained vacant, but furnished, including this chair. My parents called it their "summer place." The house fell into disrepair and has long since been demolished. Montezuma's chair was moved to my Dad's Elmira home until I inherited it and moved it to my home in Ottawa.

By that time, it had a final layer of yellowed white paint over many layers of other colours including beige yellow and black. The seat was scored from years of splitting kindling for the morning wood fire on it. I had the chair professionally stripped, reglued and refinished to match our maple kitchen furniture. The refinisher said it was only being held together by the paint.

The seat is still scored from the daily kindling splitting. The cuts are too deep to sand out. I like it that way.

Before I inherited this chair, two of my aunts, (Rilla and Fanny Minerva), on different occasions, told me that Montezuma always sat with his left hand grasping the back support of the chair in such a way that his fingers had worn away a spot under the wooden back rail  and that I should look for it. Apparently it was a well known fact among Montezuma's family, (they and my father were grandchildren), that this "rubbed out spot" existed. Sure enough it does exist and I made sure that the refinisher didn't sand it out. You can just see the edge of Montezuma's "rubbed out spot" in the photo between the second and third back spindles of the chair, counting from the left side, on the under side of the back rail.

The refinisher told me in about 1988 that the chair is made from Basswood and was about 150 years old at that date. (Montezuma could have had it all of his adult life. Wouldn't it be nice to discover that he had inherited it from his or his wife's parents??)