The AWI Museum

The American Watchmakers Institute (AWI) Orville & Josephine Hagans Museum in Harrison, Ohio, contains some of the famous Packard Collection.¹³ James Ward Packard (1863-1928), of the Packard car, had a group of highly complicated watches made for him by the most renowned European makers of the beginning of the twentieth century, most notably by Patek, Philippe in Geneva. He originally intended them to be in a Packard Museum in Warren, Ohio, then instead willed the watches to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Just before he died in 1928 he changed his mind and made his bequest to the Horological Institute of America that became the American Watchmakers Institute. The Packard Collection was on display for many years at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., on loan from AWI. During World War II it was moved to the Chicago Science Museum, then traveled back to the Smithsonian. The AWI retrieved the watches and some of them are still at the Institute’s headquarters, the Hagans Museum, but several of the most complicated were sold back to Patek Philippe for Patek’s 150th anniversary.

The Bowdoin Museum of Art

In 1921 the Hon. James Phinney Baxter (1831-1921) bequeathed his collection of 35 watches to the Bowdoin Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine. Current publicity for the Walker Art Building of Bowdoin College makes no mention of a watch collection; the collection is still housed there but it is in storage. It may be seen by appointment.

Michigan State University Museum

The Paul Chamberlain watch collection is at the Michigan State University Museum in East Lansing. Chamberlain, who died in 1940, was an engineer by profession who became a renowned watch historian and collector. Like Barclay Stephens, he did not begin collecting until after World War I. His interesting collection was supplemented by his seminal book about watches, watch escapements, and watchmakers, It’s About Time,¹⁴ which was published after his death. His collection is still at the museum in East Lansing but it is not on display.

The Indianapolis Museum of Art

The Indianapolis Museum of Art owns the Ruth Allison Lilly collection of pocket watches, bequeathed to them in 1973.¹⁵ Ruth Allison Lilly (1892-1973) was a generation later than the Proctors. She was secretary to Ely Lilly and married him in 1927. Her important collection, covering four centuries of watchmaking, has indeed been lovingly looked after and researched. Seventy-five watches from the collection were in a special display at the museum in 1984. The whole collection is installed in two locations on the first and second floors of the museum.

The Dartmouth College Museum

The Dartmouth College Museum has the Hugh Grant Rowell¹⁶ clock collection. Dr. Rowell (1892-1963) began collecting clocks in 1931, again, later than the Proctors by a generation. A graduate of Dartmouth, professor at Columbia University, Director of the Philipse Castle Restoration and the Sunnyside Restoration (the home of Washington Irving), Dr. Rowell left most of his clocks to the Dartmouth College Museum where they are on view and appreciated.

Dispersed Collections

What famous early collections have completely disappeared? Most collections, in fact, did not stay together, either in a house or in a museum. Instead they were dispersed, usually by auction. The Henry Symons Collection was sold at auction by the American Art Galleries in 1915. (Thomas Proctor may have purchased at least one watch at this sale.) The Henry P. Strause collection of clocks was on loan to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. In 1937 the Museum offered for sale A Catalogue of the Henry P. Strause Collection of Clocks,¹⁷ a 72-page booklet listing 118 timekeepers, mostly tallcase clocks by notable makers, all non-American. In 1948 Mr. Strause died and the collection was sold at auction. In 1918 the American Art Galleries in New York advertised an “Executors Unrestricted Public Sale of the Collection of the Late Charles Gregory,” consisting of watch chains, keys, movements, antique and modern watches and clocks. In 1926 the collection of Lyman C. Flynt of Monson, Massachusetts, was sold; in April of that year, an ad from W. & J. Sloan, New York, offered clocks from the Lyman C. Flynt Collection; in December of that year, the American Art Association in New York further offered for sale 400 early American and foreign clocks from the collection of Mr. Lyman C. Flynt (the auction was conducted by Mr. 0. Bernet and Mr. H. H. Parke).

Other dispersed collections include that of Harry W. Yassen, a jeweler in Chicago, who began collecting in 1902 and was still at it when he joined NAWCC in the 1940s. Short notices about his collection appeared in the H.I.A. Journal in 1949 and 1950, then silence. The A. F. Pontz Collection was sold at auction in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in 1951. The C. Winthrop Brown Collection was sold at auction by Parke-Bernet in 1940. Moore mentioned the collection of Frederick Lincoln Crane of Boston, Kernwood Hill and Crane’s Beach, Ipswich, who owned Paul Revere's watch. Where is it now?

So among the other early collections still together and on view in their original site are the Tafts, Henry Ford’s, Henry Clay Frick’s, and Henry Huntington’s. The Taft Museum of Art’s collection shows the era’s passion for collecting. The Henry Ford Museum preserves a historic watchmaking perspective. Among collections that have been kept together in other museums and that are identified by donor are the Heinz Collection at the Carnegie Institute, the Ruth Allison Lilly Collection at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Hugh Grant Rowell Collection at Dartmouth College. These latter collections, dating from later in the twentieth century, have their own venues, such as the clocks at Sturbridge Village.

The Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute offers to the public a rare and unusual opportunity to see a choice and, above all, personal, hundred-year-old collection on site. Lovers of clocks and watches should be attracted to MWPAI to see the collection and to learn more about how it was to be a collector nearly a hundred years ago.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank the personnel of the museums discussed for their help in disclosing the whereabouts today of these early collections.

Notes

1  Munson-Williams-Proctor Art Institute, Watches: The Proctor Collection, Utica, 1988.

2  Welcome Home to the Taft Museum. Brochure published by the Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, OH.

3  Jonathan W. Snellenburg, “Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Watches,” The Taft Museum. European Decorative Arts (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995).

4  Abby Schwartz, “Swiss Watches in the Taft Collection,” Glass on Metal, Vol. 18, No. 3 (October 1999): p. 51. The Enamelist Society, Newport, Kentucky.

5  Tom N. Michels, “Henry Ford - The Collector,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 54 (June 1954): p. 213.

6  Catalog of the Huntington Art Collections, San Marino, CA, 1948.

7  N. Hudson Moore, The Old Clock Book (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1911).

8  Collection of Watches Loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art of the City of New York by Mrs. George A. Hearn, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1907.

9  Annals of the Carnegie Museum, Vol. XII, No. 1, November 1917.

10  John M. Arthur, “Echoes of the Past,” Coleraine Constitution (January 1983).

11  Robert S. Edwards, “The Cosmochronotrope, An Astronomical Clock at the Smithsonian,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 252 (February 1988): p. 3.

12  Urban Thielmann, “Early Giants: Doctor W. Barclay Stephens,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 229 (April 1984): p. 172.

13  Henry B. Fried, “The Packard Collection,” Hobbies (March 1972): p. 144; (April 1972): p. 154; (June 1972): p. 124; and (July 1972): p. 124.

14  Paul M. Chamberlain, It’s About Time (New York: Richard R. Smith, 1941).

15  Catherine Beth Lippert, “The Ruth Allison Lilly Watch Collection,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 229 (April 1984): p. 133.

16  Allen L. King, “Dr. Rowell and his Clocks,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 284 (June 1993): p. 274.

17  Henry P. Strause, Collection of Clocks (Richmond, VA: Virginia Museum of Arts, 1937).