Courtney, pb is right on. If you are sure that you will be keeping the current dining room chairs for a while, you could just measure to the top of the back of the side chairs and use that height. It does sound like you might consider large crown molding to match the scale. Your paper border may compensate or here's another idea.
Shaker houses and other older styles tended to hang furniture on the walls when the furniture was not in use. This kept the center of the room more open. Those "Shaker pegs" that you often see were spaced around the room on a high rail on the wall. It was also common to add a lower rail for the bottoms of chair legs so they didn't mar the wall. I don't know that I've ever seen anything in writing about this, but I think that it might have been possible that the higher rail in a Shaker house became the picture rail in a Victorian one. Upscale Victorian houses often had picture rails about a foot or so under the bottom of the crown molding on an 8 or 9 foot ceiling.
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