The Chapin shops in East Windsor represent a well-known and historically significant example of the transfer of cultural traits from one region to another. Excommunicated from his congregation in East Windsor, CT, in the 1760s, Eliphalet Chapin moved to Philadelphia, where he learned to make furniture according to local prototypes that were much more elaborately ornamented and more finely wrought than previously made in the Connecticut River Valley. When Chapin returned to Connecticut in the 1770s, his “exotic” furniture offered a dramatically different stylistic alternative for Connecticut consumers. The applied carving is a monogram, common on silver, but rare on New England furniture in the 1780s.