CONNECTICUT staTE department of educate library service center , •/AIDDLETOV/N, CONNECTICUT TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS J3 XXIII Early Clockmaking in Connecticut PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION [934 9 74.6 TER, "Reprinted November, 1957" XXIII 5000837lf Connecticut State Library Library Service Center 3outb Main Street 'icidletown, Connecticut TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS Early Clockmaking in Connecticut PENROSE R. HOOPES HE first clockmaker on the American con- tinent of whom a record has been found was Thomas Nash, an original settler of New Haven in 1638. Like many of the European Tclockmakers of that day he combined clockmaking with the trade of the gunsmith. It was, indeed, to the latter art that he devoted most of his attention during the twenty years that he lived and worked in America. His home lot was on the west side of what is now State Street, about a third of the distance from Chapel to Elm, and in a little shop on that lot he and his three sons made and repaired firearms for the earliest inhabitants of New Haven. Not a great deal is known about Thomas Nash's life in New Haven. He was admitted a freeman of the town in 1639, and was a member of the general court in 1640. His holdings of land were not extensive, for his time was largely devoted to his trade, although like most of his contemporaries he necessarily cultivated a modest farm. In 1645 he was a "fence viewer" and in 1646 the general court decreed that "In regard to several occasions and works to be done against trayning day, Brother Nash is Copyright 1934, by P. R. Hoopes. spared." As late as February i, 1657, he had charge of the town's muskets, but on May 12, 1658, he died leaving an estate made up in great part of his shop tools. Among these tools was "one round plate for making clocks." This was the early seventeenth-century tool for laying out clock-wheel teeth, the only specialized clockmaker's de- vice which might differentiate his equipment from that of the gunsmith. This carefully itemized tool, supplemented by the more generalized metal-working devices noted in the inventory of the shop, affords presumptive evidence that Nash was both a gunsmith and a clockmaker. It can not, of course, be asserted that he actually constructed any complete clocks after his arrival in New Haven. He was certainly capable of doing such work and was un- questionably the man who kept the early clocks and watches of New Haven in running order. His work with clocks must, however, have been but a small fraction of his business, for there were probably not a dozen clocks in the colony during his lifetime, while every settler was fully provided with firearms which in the aggregate re- quired the constant attention of Nash and his sons. There is a temptation to credit Thomas Nash with being the father of American clockmaking and to attempt to trace a gradual outgrowth of the trade from his shop and through his apprentices. Unfortunately the facts do not justify such an hypothesis. None of his sons paid any attention to clocks although they became the leading gunsmiths of New Haven, Hartford, and Hadley. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when records are encountered of the actual making of clocks in America, the men engaged in the work seem without exception to have been European-trained immigrants. It is probable that the skill in clockmaking which Nash brought to New Haven in 1638 was of such slight practical importance to 1 the community that it, in great part, died with him, leav- ing the task of permanently establishing the trade in the colonies to a later generation of craftsmen. He is signifi- cant as the first American clockmaker, the first to bring the highest type of craft skill to the New World, and the pioneer in a business which was later to play an important part in the industrial life of Connecticut. For over fifty years after the death of Nash clockmak- ing seems to have been neglected in Connecticut. Toward the end of the seventeenth century it was an established trade in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, but the first clear reference to its practice in Connecticut appears in the Guilford records of 1726. In that year Ebenezer Parmele installed a tower clock in the meetinghouse at Guilford. From that time onward to the end of the cen- tury domestic tall clocks with brass movements of the same types as those made in England were turned out by native craftsmen in most of the larger towns and many of the smaller villages of Connecticut. Most of these clocks were eight-day, striking, tall clocks, but musical clocks, thirty-hour timepieces, tower clocks, and even pocket watches were produced in small quantities. From first to last during the eighteenth century Con- necticut was the home of nearly one hundred clockmakers. The absence of large towns in Connecticut, and the scarcity of men of wealth, had a tendency during colonial days to encourage numerous small and widely scattered clock shops and to support a local industry which could supply clocks at substantially lower cost than those im- ported from Europe. The early Connecticut clockmakers were, in general, more self-sufficient, even if more con- servative and provincial in their methods, than their Philadelphia and Boston contemporaries. While the latter made frequent use of imported materials and tools, most 3 of the Connecticut workers were necessarily largely in- dependent of outside sources for their supplies. They were indeed forced to buy up scrap brass which they melted and cast into clock parts, and even to construct their own lathes and wheel-cutting engines. The limited demand for clocks in the smaller communities led the rural clockmaker to cultivate versatility and encouraged him to undertake a variety of trades unnecessary for the worker in a large town. It was, in a measure, this early and wide distribution of clockmaking in the country towns of Connecticut, and the resulting self-reliance and enforced readiness of the clockmakers to turn a hand to any variety of mechanical work, that fostered the in- genuity and commercial aggressiveness which ultimately resulted in the preeminence of Connecticut as the center of clockmaking in America. In one field of eighteenth-century clockmaking Con- necticut occupied a unique position, for the wooden clock seems to have had its American origin and practically its entire development in that colony. History is silent on the origin of the wooden clock. There is little doubt, however, that such clocks were made quite as early as metal clocks and it is not at all unlikely that many of the clocks which records show were so common in Europe in the middle- class homes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were actually of wood. Most of the industrial machinery prior to the eighteenth century was constructed of wood, and even within the memories of some of the older mechan- ics of the present day, wooden machinery and wooden gearing were still in daily use in the United States. There are few early references to the making of wooden clocks, although it is well known that John Harrison, the inven- tor of the chronometer, made such clocks in England at least as early as 1700, while in America wooden clocks 4 were regular articles of commerce by 1745. The early Connecticut wood clock was a massive, thirty-hour, tall clock, wound by pulling down on the weight cords. It was crudely made but was nevertheless a remarkably satis- factory timekeeper. It was sometimes fitted with a fine brass dial and placed in a handsome case, to which facts must be credited the survival of the few existing examples known at the present time. There are some indications pointing to the possibility that wooden clocks may have been first made in Connect- icut as early as 1715 in the vicinity of New Haven, but the earliest surviving clocks of this type seem to be those produced in East Hartford by Benjamin Cheney about the year 1745. Presumably Cheney learned the trade from Seth Youngs of Hartford, and it is possible that the latter was in turn instructed in the art by Ebenezer Parmele, the woodworker and clockmaker of Guilford. For many years East Hartford was the center of the busi- ness, and in 1761 when John Fitch, the inventor, was working for Benjamin Cheney, the latter was devoting all his time to making wooden clocks. Benjamin Cheney was not the only Connecticut maker of wooden clocks during the second half of the eighteenth century, but he was apparently the most successful, and it was from him or from his brother Timothy Cheney that Eli Terry de- rived his knowledge of the art, a knowledge which he later applied to the design of the popular, wooden, shelf clock of the early nineteenth century. After the Revolutionary War there was a notable in- crease in the number of makers of wooden clocks and in the quantity of such clocks which each maker produced. Gideon Roberts and John Rich of Bristol, James Harrison of Waterbury, Wooster Harrison of Newfield, and Eli Terry of Plymouth were especially active in this business 5 between 1790 and 1800. They disposed of their clocks by extensive peddling throughout New England and as far south as New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and in this man- ner laid the foundations for the subsequent concentration of the large-scale clock industry in Connecticut.