Early American Clockmakers: Willard Movements

Video Transcript

There's an ongoing controversy about who actually made the Willard movements, and whether the Willards made them all. Of course, the old-timers, the people who are totally enamored of the whole Willard legacy, like to think of Simon and Aaron and all their descendants and other brothers, sitting at the work bench with their files, and making individual gears and putting them all together. And I'm sure that that's what they did in Grafton, and perhaps, even in later years with more specialized clocks. But there was an article written by a friend and colleague of mine, Robert Cheney, that appeared in Antiques Magazine a few years ago, where he summarized the years of research that he put in to studying these Willard movements, because he really came to realize that a lot of them, particularly the ones that are in literally thousands of long case clocks, in the Roxbury cases, were probably made in England, or at least the components of the movements were made in England. England had a much more thriving clock manufacturing industry of the time. They were able to export both completed movements and the components of them. And what Robert Cheney came to realize was that so many of these movements that he'd see in Willard clocks from the same period were different. And he was thinking, if the Willards were actually making these movements, why were little pieces different, and...in ways that were just perhaps, aesthetic, or just perhaps in a slightly different position. It didn't make any sense. If they were making movement after movement, they would have made them the same way. He was looking at parts like these, where, maybe in the next clock in the series, you'd see that...a slightly different shape, or a slightly different placement or a way of attaching it. And then he came across catalogs from manufacturers in England, showing these parts, showing these assembled movements. And there certainly was plenty of trade, plenty of boats coming from England, that could've had several crates of these movements ready for the Willards to put into their clocks.

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