At the turn of the nineteenth century, Concord was a thriving community, already
famous throughout the young nation for its critical early role in the events leading up to the
American Revolution. It was the half shire town for Middlesex County, attracting over 500
visitors to the courts twice a year, among them customers for Concord’s hats, shoes,
(5)carriages and clocks. Among Concord’s approximately 400 heads of households in this
period, about 65% were in agriculture, 4% in commerce, and 35% in manufacturing. Of
those in manufacturing, seven men headed clockmaking shops and another thirty or so
were engaged in the shops or in businesses that supplied the clockmaking trade – the
brass foundry, iron forge, wire-drawing mill, and a number of cabinetmaking shops. In
(10)short, the center of Concord, the Milldam, was a machine for the production of clocks,
second only in importance to Boston’s industrial Roxbury Neck, where the influential
Willard family had been producing clocks since about 1785.
While the handsome and well-crafted clocks of these seven shops, featuring inlaid
mahogany cases, enameled dials and reverse painted glasses, are generally perceived as
(15)products of a traditional clockmaker (one person at a bench fashioning an eight-day clock
from scratch) , they are actually products of a network of shops employing journeymen
labor that extended from Concord to Boston and overseas to the highly developed tool
trade of Lancashire, England.
In addition to crafting in the fashionable Willard features such as the pierced
(20)fretwork, columns with brass fixtures, and white enamel dial, Concord clockmakers
attempted to differentiate their products from those of the Willards through such means as
a distinctive ornamental inlay, which added to the perception of custom work not usually
seen on the Willard’s standardized products. The Willards also made less expensive wall
clocks, including “banjo clocks” patented by Simon Willard in 1802. The distinctive
(25)diamond shaped design and inverted movement of some Concord wall clocks may reflect
an attempt to circumvent Willard’s patent.