Philip Zea and Robert C. Cheney. Clock Making in New England, 1725–1825: An Interpretation of the Old Sturbridge Village Collection. Edited by Caroline F. Sloat. Sturbridge, Mass.: Old Sturbridge Village, 1992. 173 pp., numerous color and bw illus., line drawings, appendixes. $34.95.
For cultural historians and others who study and interpret the decorative arts, clocks are exceptionally rich objects. Typically combining the skills of clockmakers, cabinetmakers, inlaymakers, brassfounders, silversmiths, engravers, and decorative painters, clocks are usually signed by their makers and often bear additional clues to their ownership, cost, distribution, and subsequent repairs. For curators and collectors faced with the same clues, clocks can be daunting objects, the genuine article being costly and rare and even the simple examples requiring a broad knowledge of different media (metal, wood, glass) and historical trades. As a result, the literature on American clocks over the past century has naturally divided along disciplinary lines of technology and art, lines that often fail to converge. Caught somewhere in between is a long tradition of pictorial survey begun by N. Hudson Moore (The Old Clock Book [New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1911]), maintained by Wallace Nutting (The Clock Book [Framingham: Old American Company, 1924]), and revived by William Distin and Robert Bishop (The American Clock: A Comprehensive Pictorial Survey, 1723–1900 [1976; reprint, New York: Bonanza Books, 1983]).
In the past two decades, only a few books on American clocks have successfully combined two or more of these approaches, often with contributions by two or more authors. In the case of The American Clock, 1725–1865 (Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1973), a catalogue of American clocks in the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, Edwin A. Battison, Curator of Horology at the Smithsonian, supplied extensive technical notes for Patricia E. Kane’s entries. Published two years later, Two Hundred Years of American Clocks and Watches (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice Hall, 1975) by Chris H. Bailey is still the best overview of American clocks and clockmaking, a subject worthy of several volumes by now and one that may be better addressed by regional surveys such as the late Charles Parsons’s lifetime pursuit of New Hampshire clocks.
The present volume by Philip Zea and Robert C. Cheney, Clockmaking in New England, 1725–1825: An Interpretation of the Old Sturbridge Village Collection, is a successful synthesis of both models. Ultimately, Zea and Cheney, like Bailey, have written much more than a collection catalogue or a regional checklist. Indeed, a checklist of clocks appears only at the end of the book as “Technical Data” (Appendix A), arranged by accession number and printed in minuscule type. (It is not clear whether the list includes all the clocks in the collection or just those under consideration for this book.) Technical notes on the movement, escapement, and strike train are a significant improvement over the first publication on the Sturbridge collection by Charles Avery issued in 1955. The usefulness of Clockmaking in New England as a reference book, however, is diminished by the regrettable omission of an index, alphabetical list of clockmakers, concordance, or any other means of locating these objects in the body of the text. Considering the early formation of the Wells collection, it also would have been instructive to know where these clocks had been published previously. It is even more regrettable that such a well-researched book lacks even a general bibliography.
As stated in the introduction, the goals of the book are to interpret clocks “in their historical context” and to show how clocks are “part of the fabric of New England life” (p. 5). For this project, Philip Zea and Robert Cheney are the ideal collaborators. Zea has written eloquently about rural New England furniture and craftsmen in Brock Jobe and Myrna Kaye, New England Furniture: The Colonial Era (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), and his earlier article on Jedidiah and Jabez Baldwin, published by the Dublin Seminar (1981), is an exemplary comparison of the lives and livelihoods of an urban and a rural New England clockmaker and their patrons. Cheney, a third-generation clockmaker who has served for years as a consultant to Old Sturbridge Village, knows the J. Cheney Wells collection intimately. Through training, experience, and his own research, he has a thorough knowledge of New England clocks and is eminently well qualified to discuss alterations, replacements, and forgeries in the final chapter titled “Spurious Timepieces: Alarming Signs and How to Recognize Them.” It is a tribute to the editor Caroline F. Sloat that the individual voices of the authors do not emerge separately.
Organized into six chapters, the book begins with an overview titled “Clockmaking in Colonial New England.” Citing tall clocks by Gawen Brown of Boston and the Claggetts of Newport, Zea and Cheney discuss the transmission of British clockmaking traditions to coastal New England cities during the second quarter of the eighteenth century. Later tall clocks with wooden movements by Jonas Fitch and John Bailey of Massachusetts and by the Cheneys of Connecticut speak for the adaptation of these traditions by inland craftsmen lacking access to imported raw materials. Despite the limitations of the Sturbridge collection, this essay makes thorough use of early-eighteenth-century newspapers, account books, manuscripts, and secondary sources as well as the clocks themselves to portray the environment in which the first American clocks were made and owned. Throughout the book, the authors maintain an effective balance between technological, aesthetic, and cultural concerns. Unlike more narrowly focused studies, this interpretation reflects the broad interests of Zea, a seasoned historian who draws insight from a number of sources ranging from Puritan sermons to urban workshop practices, rural blast furnaces, and merchants’ best parlors, which serve to supplement Cheney’s technical analysis of clocks.
For many readers, the main appeal of Clock Making in New England will be its three central chapters that address the Willard phenomenon, the work of their many apprentices, and their impact on clockmaking in New England during the early national period. Since the publication in 1911 of A History of Simon Willard, Inventor and Clockmaker by his great-grandson, John Ware Willard, the name of Simon Willard has loomed larger than life and arguably out of proportion to his historical contribution. In the absence of shop records or account books, the authors have combined close scrutiny of every kind of clock made by the Willards with every known scrap of documentation to present a full account of “their developing business and scientific interests” (p. 29). In the process, some new information emerges, such as Benjamin Willard’s removal to York, Pennsylvania, during the Revolutionary War (pp. 31–32).
The authors’ analysis of six tall clocks by Simon and Aaron in the collection leads to the reasonable conclusion that “opulent cases masked standardized production,” the bread and butter that allowed Simon Willard and his sons to pursue more experimental designs and scientific instruments. Though it is helpful to know that the cost of the average tall clock represented approximately half the annual salary of hired agricultural labor (p. 37), it is less obvious how these clocks could be “in the mainstream of urban clockmaking on both sides of the Atlantic” with cases based on recognizably old-fashioned, “mid-century London styles” (p. 38). As with bombé case furniture, it may be that some wealthy buyers preferred a more conservative, English expression of opulence. By comparison, the design of the patented timepiece (the so-called “banjo clock”) was completely original, and the authors’ discussion of various cost options in light of accounts kept by John Doggett and nearby ornamental painters gives an excellent sense of the extensive collaboration and subcontracting among Boston artisans in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The real value of chapter 2, “‘Elegant Faces and Mahogany Cases’: Clocks by the Willard Family,” is its frank reevaluation of famous designs (the thirty-hour timepiece, weight-driven shelf clocks, tall clocks, patented timepieces and alarm clocks, gallery clocks, and regulators) and the factors behind their development.
The chapter that follows, “The Willard Legacy: Clocks by Their Apprentices,” addresses the impact of the Willards on clocks made by nearly a dozen of their apprentices, several of whom were related by marriage to each other and to the Willards. As Zea and Cheney demonstrate, the similarities among their work are more striking than the differences, and they help shed light on the business of clockmaking and its evolution by midcentury. One wonders how many superior mechanics like Gardner Parker of Westborough were overshadowed by the self-perpetuating success of their masters. Those like Elnathan Taber and William Cummens who remained in Roxbury continued to produce clocks that are nearly indistinguishable from the work of Simon and Aaron. Those who left the Boston area still found it difficult to compete against the Willards’ well-established reputation and far-flung apparatus for marketing and distribution.
The last of the three main chapters, titled “As Neat as at Roxbury: Clock Making in Federal New England,” examines the careers of clockmakers who were not trained by the Willards and of the vast majority who worked in the Yankee hinterland. Although rural patrons sought elegant timepieces for the same reasons as their urban counterparts, rural artisans tended to work seasonally while marching “to agricultural rhythms” (p. 101). In a barter economy, clockmakers typically lacked the cash necessary to purchase cast metal and imported materials for fine clockmaking. This territory is familiar for Zea, and he does a superb job of discerning both innovation and compromise in a disparate group of clocks from Maine, New Hampshire, and central Massachusetts. Original research in primary documents produces occasional nuggets, such as Nichols Goddard of Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, who ordered steel and clock parts from Germany in 1789 (p. 107). For readers satiated by the “immutable” elegance of Roxbury-style clocks, several of the cases in this chapter display interesting abstractions of familiar ornament, such as the attenuated fretwork in the hoods of clocks by John Edwards and Alexander T. Willard of Ashby, Massachusetts.
The final interpretive chapter, “A Clock for Every Home: Connecticut’s Clock Makers Show the Way,” inevitably shifts gears with the industrialized manufacture of clocks in Connecticut between 1800 and 1830. Admittedly not a primary collecting interest of J. Cheney Wells (p. 119), the shifts from craft to industry and from patron to consumer are important themes in the interpretation of Old Sturbridge Village as a museum. This period has been well covered elsewhere, particularly by Chris Bailey, and is better represented in other museum collections. Nevertheless, Zea and Cheney make good use of the extensive secondary literature as well as of contemporary letters and account books at the libraries of the American Clock and Watch Museum and the Connecticut Historical Society. The result is a very readable account of Silas Hoadley, Seth Thomas, Eli Terry, and others who gradually transformed the manufacture and ownership of clocks.
Considering the decision to illustrate and discuss only clocks in the collection at Old Sturbridge Village (except for one lantern clock), the authors of this book are remarkably successful in their effort to provide an historical and cultural interpretation of clocks and clockmaking in New England. Where the collection is relatively weak (chapters 1 and 5), the narrative is bolstered by historical documents; where it is strong (chapters 2–4), the technical and historical portions are well balanced.
In this context, one might normally regard a final “how to” chapter on identifying fakes and forgeries as a thinly veiled ploy to appeal to a wider audience. Thanks to Robert Cheney’s familiarity with the clocks at Sturbridge and the wisdom inherited from his father and grandfather, however, this chapter is a fascinating guide across the treacherous terrain of altered cases, dials, reverse-painted glass, patent timepieces (where the stakes are especially high), high-quality reproductions from the 1920s and 1930s, and “updated” antiques, “marriages,” and “improvements.” Although Cheney stops short of describing certain tricks of the trade (“It is not the author’s intent to create a ‘faker’s handbook’” [p. 142]), his essay based on the study collection at Sturbridge provides many useful lessons not available elsewhere.
Throughout this book, Zea and Cheney manage to elucidate complicated objects without ever losing sight of the larger context of clockmaking in nineteenth-century New England. The clarity of the text and the logical juxtaposition of consistently clear photographs set this book apart from dozens of previous attempts to cover the same material. Thanks to the determination of J. Cheney Wells to amass a comprehensive collection of work by the Willards, their apprentices, and their competitors, the collection at Sturbridge is well qualified to serve as the basis for a study of New England clocks. Historians, curators, and collectors are all well served by this lucid interpretation.
Thomas S. Michie
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design