asakiyume | Timey-Wimey

One day last summer, I attempted to bring an injured catbird to a wildlife rehabilitation center. Sadly, the bird died in transit, but on the way, I discovered the existence of the Willard House and Clock Museum.

The plaque outside the house contains this thought-provoking statement:

"The realization that time could be spent rather than passed marks a profound change in the way Americans think--and work."

How magical: a whole museum of clocks! I resolved to go as soon as conditions permitted it.

This week they permitted it, and Wakanomori and I went. Our docent, Sarah Mullen, was a fountain of knowledge--literally any question we asked her, she had information on. Including how the original Willards got their land: Apparently the son of an important Nipmuc man wanted his son to have a European education and sent him to school in the Boston area. When the term ended, the school asked for six pieces of silver, and when the boy couldn't pay, the school extracted 300 acres of land from the father. Some of that land was then sold to the grandfather Willard, whose four grandsons (Benjamin, Simon, Ephraim, and Aaron) became the clockmaking Willards. Ah, the colonists. Covering themselves in glory, as usual.

(Interestingly, Grafton, MA, where the Willard House and Clock Museum is located, has land that has remained continuously in the hands of the Nipmuc people.)

The clocks though! Benjamin, the oldest brother, was the least skilled clockmaker, and he limited himself standing clocks. These are less difficult to make because there's more space for all the moving parts.

The face of a Benjamin Willard clock

Cool clockmaking fact: all the gears 'n' stuff inside the clock are called "the movement." The person who makes "the movement" is different from the person who makes the case, who's different from the person who provides the ornamentation and so on. The clockmaker makes the movement, sometimes out of wood, sometimes out of brass (maybe other metals too, but Sarah only mentioned brass).

Simon was the clever brother. He patented a method of fitting all the movement of a standing clock into a clock that could hang on a wall ("It looks like a banjo," Sarah said). He got a patent for this, and these clocks go by the name of "patent timepiece".

Simon Willard's patent timepiece

I asked why they were called "timepieces," and Sarah told me that technically a thing is only a clock if it chimes the hours! And in fact, something can lack a face and numbers, but if it chimes the hours, it's a clock--but if it doesn't chime the hours, it's a timepiece.

Most wall clocks--er, timepieces--had to be wound once a day, whereas the standing clocks only needed to be wound once a week. Here's Sarah setting the time on one.

Aaron Willard made some of the clocks I thought were prettiest. The thing that looks like a smiling peach is not the sun but the moon. The continents rotate up to cover various parts of its face in alignment with the phases of the moon:

Loved the 18th-cent. nomenclature for the places--Barbary, Tartary, and the Great Sea:

This guy looks tipsy!

Simon Willard's Astronomical Timepiece (1781-84) is hard to decipher now, but you can see from the explanatory sheet all the things that it could tell you (click through to embiggen)

Simon Willard's Astronomical Shelf Timekeeper c. 1781-84

The insides of the standing clocks often had notes about provenance and history in them. This one had a poem:
I am old and worn as my face appears for I have walked on time for a hundred years;
Many have fallen since I begun and many will fall 'ere my race is run;
I've hurried the world with its hopes and its fears,
in my long, long march of a hundred years.

You could also look at a workroom, set up to show you the various tools of clockmaking, including this: a treadle-powered machine for cutting gears:

close-up of the cutting mechanism

close-up of the treadle machine for cutting gears

There were also lots of portraits of family (and stories of family strife). This one is identified as Hannah Willard, a daughter of Simon--but who is the mysterious figure behind her? Sarah Mullen thinks it's the ghost of her mother, watching over her, and that's why she's painted in timeless Classical Era style, with a grape-leaf garland.

And the house itself was fascinating--a table laid with heavy pewter cutlery; a desk with reading glasses and a tiny book of psalms, a device for rotating a joint as it hangs over the fire, so it will be evenly cooked, a bread oven beside the main fire ... It was a great way to spend an afternoon.