The Horologist's Daughter: Harmon Estate Clocks, Part 5

It seems fitting that my grandfather's clock collection includes a few Waterbury clocks, since I live in Waterbury.

Brief History

The Waterbury Clock Company was one of the major Waterbury manufacturers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, originally established as a department of Benedict & Burnham Manufacturing Co. Benedict & Burnham hired Chauncey and Noble Jerome, clockmaking brothers with whom they had previously partnered, to set up their movement and case making shops during the mid-1850s.

The Waterbury Clock Company was formed in 1857 as a joint stock corporation. Noble Jerome continued as supervisor of the movement shop. Edward Church, who had worked with Chauncey Jerome for nearly two decades, took over supervision of the case shop. When Noble Jerome died in 1861, he was replaced by Silas B. Terry, son of clockmaker Eli Terry. (Silas B. Terry left the company in 1867 to form the Terry Clock Company.)

By 1868, Waterbury Clock was exporting 50,000 clocks to England every year. They were one of several Connecticut companies represented by a NYC sales agency called the American Clock Company. Sales offices in Chicago and San Francisco were opened by 1875, and an office in Glasgow, Scotland opened in 1886.

The success of the company led to it becoming independent of Benedict & Burnham in 1887. New factories and an office building were constructed on North Elm and Cherry Street in Waterbury, employing some 700 people. Further expansions during the first fifteen years of the twentieth century made Waterbury Clock the largest clock manufacturer in the country.

In 1922, Waterbury Clock acquire the Ingersoll watch company. Financial difficulties during the Great Depression led to the Waterbury Clock being reorganized as Ingersoll-Waterbury, with a shift in production to focus on electric clocks and the highly lucrative Mickey Mouse wristwatch. The company was sold in 1942 to a group of Norwegian investors, who relocated the company to the neighboring town of Middlebury. They changed the company’s name to United States Time Corporation in 1944. Clockmaking disappeared, and the company renamed itself once more, in 1969: their Timex wristwatch was so successful, they made it their corporate identity.

The Timex worldheadquarters is still located in Middlebury. Their company museum, Timexpo, opened in 2001 in Waterbury and has a comprehensive collection of Waterbury clocks, Timex watches, and related material.

The Clocks

These are wood mantel clocks, popular during the 1880s and 1890s. The first two are of a design that is sometimes referred to as "gingerbread," since they look a little bit like the cases were made out of gingerbread.

The Waterbury Clock Company had hundreds of different case designs, all of them with distinctive names. Using Tran Duy Ly's guide books, I've been able to identify only one of the clocks.

The "Afton," 1890s.

The dial has seen better days, but is is nice to see a dial that has never been retouched.

The next clock case makes me imagine an owl spreading its wings in the night sky. It is similar to the "Hargrave," but with subtle differences in the case design, a different scene on the glass, and a different pendulum.

The pendulum is a design that was patented on March 29, 1881 by Florence Kroeber (a man, despite the name). Kroeber was a German immigrant with his own clock company in 1870, purchasing movements from Connecticut manufacturers. The main office was at 8 Cortlandt Street in NYC, next door to Waterbury Clock's New York office, at 10 Cortlandt Street.

Patent drawing for Kroeber's pendulum.

Detail of the Kroeber pendulum.

The third clock has a surprisingly plain case for Waterbury Clock Co., but the name stamped on the pendulum and the labels on the back leave no doubt as to who made it.