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Making Century-Old Clocks Tick
UNLIKE TIME, which never waits, old timepieces almost always do. Provided they’re merely set aside, not discarded.
After a long wait — tick-tockless years of storage on half-hidden cellar shelves — the Buffalo Historical Society’s clock collection is getting attention.
Many of the nearly 60 American and European clocks, mostly from the 18th and 19th Centuries, are expected to be on exhibit in the society museum within 12 months.
Curative fingers of clock fanciers are at work, cleaning, reassemblying, rebuilding and refinishing. The fingers belong to members of the Western New York Chapter, National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors Inc.
DIALS, CASES
and movements — nondescript because of grimy coatings of neglect — are regaining their identities. The proud handiwork of early clockmakers and allied cabinetmakers is beginning to show.
Happiest result to Willard I. Andrews of 73 Courier Blvd., Kenmore, who interested other members of the collectors’ group in helping out in the restoration project, was discovery among the uncatalogued collection of a clock from the early career — perhaps before 1780 — of Simon Willard.
Mr. Willard, a Grafton and Roxbury, Mass., clockmaker, is recognized as one of the master craftsmen. He is best known for his “banjo” wall clock, named for its distinctive shape, patented in the early 19th Century and copied by many.
Some clock collectors are no more than collectors, and don’t know one wheel from another.
But the persons busy making the museum clocks operational again have home work benches, an assortment of “junk movements” from old clocks and an eagerness to improvise in cutting gear wheels or reforming broken parts, repairing a worn bushing, replacing a missing weight or pendulum wire.
In getting the 18th Century Willard clock to run, Mr. Andrews had to find a substitute for the original gut to which the pendulum was attached.
“After a long search, a ukulele string proved to be what I needed,” he said.
“Throw nothing out” is the only safe policy for any collector who expects to keep his clocks going.
A pair of antlers, for example.
“My mother was going to dispose of a pair a few years ago, but I brought them home,” Mr. Andrews related. “Now when I have an old clock with a worn bushing to be tightened up, I go out to the garage and cut a little piece of bone from the antlers to fit in. It’s just the thing.”
THE WILLARD CLOCK
The Willard clock has been a challenge to him ever since he rubbed the dust off the dull brass of the dial and saw the name “Willard” engraved in block letters and “Grafton” under it in script.
Influential in encouraging the belief that this is one of the earliest shelf clocks made by Simon Willard, most famous member of a skilled clock-making family, are indications that the cherry case was the work of Mr. Willard himself and evidence that the brass wheels were cut and the teeth slit and filed by hand.
Collectors who have studied the plain, simple construction of the case are convinced it was not made by one of the fine cabinetmakers associated with Mr. Willard in his later years. Knowing the gnawing poverty he experienced, they speculate that he made the case himself.
AWARE OF
a long-standing controversy over whether Mr. Willard did wheels for his early clocks by hand, Mr. Andrews gave the clock movement to Bell Aircraft engineers for study.
Highly magnified pictures and shadowgraphs of the surface convinced them the wheels were, indeed, filed down by hand rather than made by a wheel-cutting machine.
Mr. Andrews also pointed out that the clock’s U-shaped weight suggests a scarcity of metals at the time it was made. Cast of lead, the weight shows many fragments of iron.
Mr. Willard was born in 1753 and is said to have made his first clock, a tall-case movement, when he was 13 after an apprenticeship with an English maker.
HE SERVED BRIEFLY
in the Army during the Revolutionary War, but by 1780 his reputation as a clockmaker had attracted many imitators.
The Historical Society’s Willard clock was donated in 1888 by Theodore G. Hulett of Niagara Falls. Mr. Hulett designed the two-seated iron “basket ferry” used to carry workmen over the gorge during construction of the first suspension bridge in Niagara Falls in 1847.
This basket is now displayed in the museum.
Museum clocks have been farmed out to collectors association members as far away as Rochester and Syracuse to be restored.
Nearby members using spare time on the project, are: Otis H. Avers, 226 Main St., Cattaraugus; Paul C. Clark, 93 Highland Ave., Hamburg; William K. Jackson, 5910 Transit Rd., Depew; Lloyd B. Johnston, 59 Westminster St., and Ensil B. Polen, 37 Rosedale Blvd., Eggertsville.
Also George T. Parker, 112 Campus Dr., Snyder; Edward T. Reynolds, 354 Wardman Rd., Kenmore; Richard B. Spraker, 95 Inwood Pl.; Mrs. Marion M. Wilcox, 247 Huxley Dr., Snyder, and Walter J. Zimmerman, 158 Mt. Vernon Rd., Snyder.
THE MUSEUM’S
collection includes one New York clock. It is a Hotchkiss & Benedict, a shelf clock made in Auburn about 1830 in a shop set up by a man from New Hampshire.
There is a tall clock — “grandfather clock” is the popular term — made by Silas Hoadley, one of the Connecticut masters. Others bear the names of Norris North and Seth Thomas, leaders in the growing clock industry in the first half of the 19th Century, when Eli Terry’s invention of the wood movement and the availability of rolled brass speeded production.
Many of the collection are simply representative of a bygone era and have no feature of distinction. This doesn’t weaken their claim to careful restoration and exhibit space.
IN FACT,
Dr. Wilbur H. Glover, museum director, believes most people prefer an “ordinary old clock.”
Especially if it reminds them of one they saw in childhood years on the shelf in grandpa’s house, it will be of more interest than some rare clock considered a prize by collectors.
Dr. Glover hopes to place some of the suitable clocks in the planned permanent exhibit of an 1870 Buffalo street and stores.
Photo captions
First photograph:
The Historical Society’s rare Simon Willard clock.
Second photograph:
This is the Buffalo Historical Society’s one New York clock, a Hotchkiss & Benedict, made in Auburn about 1830. Willard I. Andrews is shown removing the movement so that he can make repairs.
