Shades of Orsamus Roman Fyler

Orsamus Roman Fyler of either Connecticut or Vermont is one of those shadowy clockmaker figures who seems to abruptly (and randomly) pop up in our horological consciousness—and then quietly fade away—usually when someone comes across one of his clocks, asks for information on him, and is told that there is little information to be had.

Truth to tell, there isn’t all that much information available about Orsamus Roman Fyler, but he keeps on popping up in research on clockmakers in New England. A search through the Bulletin Index yields some 33 references, beginning in 1954 and running through 1995, primarily concerning his clocks and his patents. There are only two articles that have any sort of biographical information—one of these is dead wrong, the other1 has a couple of errors—and there’s nothing much at all about his clockmaking. George Eckhardt’s book2 on clock and watch patents has two listings for Fyler:

MANUFACTURING WOODEN CLOCKS
Fyler, O. R. Chelsea, Vt. Jun. 13, 1831 -

CLOCK ESCAPEMENT
Tyler, O. R. Bradford, Vt. Sep. 6, 1833 -

In the second of the two listings above, the surname is misspelled “Tyler.” Whether the original documents carried this spelling is unknown; the Patent Office burned in 1836, and everything went up in smoke. However, the text of these two patents appears as an Appendix to the book.3

Orsamus Roman Fyler, son of Roman and Hannah (Barton) Fyler, was born November 4, 1793, at Newfield, CT (near Torrington). Lane Kendall Fyler (a descendant of Fyler’s half-brother4) wrote:

“He did not marry but was a man of energy and character. He was the first inventor of a clock to run 8 days in a short case. He manufactured whetstones (author’s emphasis) and later became interested in selling the Guinabang Whetstones.”

Zadock Thompson wrote the below thumbnail sketch of Burke in his 1842 History of Vermont:

“In 1817, Roman Fyler and others, established a manufactory of shaving boxes and brushes here, and for several years manufactured these articles to the amount of from $1,000 to $2,000 annually. (Orsamus did not grow up in a poor household, regardless of its primitiveness.) In 1819 Mr. Fyler and sons (author’s emphasis) commenced the preparation of oil stones, in this town. The stone was procured from a small island (known as Whetstone Island) in Memphremagog lake [sic], and was here prepared for use and then sent to market in the amount of three or four tons annually. It has been considered nearly, or quite equal to the Turkey5 oil stone, and is generally known by the name Magog oil stone.”

“Guinabang” Whetstones? I spent frustrating weeks (and in the process got the State Geologists for both Connecticut and Vermont all wound up) looking for the source of these whetstones, only to find that “Guinabang” appears to be a spelling error in the article in Bulletin No. 56—these whetstones were quarried and prepared in Northeast Connecticut in the Quinebaug area and were known as Quinebaug Whetstones.

One has to wonder whether the Fylers ever saw the legendary monster of Lake Memphremagog, of which a note appeared in a recent local newspaper: “It was the  legendary monster of Lake Memphremagog—locally known as ‘Memphre.’ It appeared to be fairly long and narrow, disturbed a substantial amount of water, and  part of whatever it was appeared briefly above the surface before disappearing.”

The first record of this “legendary monster” dates from 1816, stating that the local Indians would not swim or bathe in the lake. Since the lake was a major conduit for illicit liquor during Prohibition, many locals put the alleged sightings down to an overindulgence in their wares by rumrunners.

Mr. Fyler continues:

“He was a man of unusual intellectual powers, studied especially geology and chemistry, and became interested in most scientific subjects. He was a perfect gentleman in manners and social life.

“He educated a young lady at Wilbraham, Massachusetts, expecting to marry her. She went south to teach, met a young southerner and married him. It was afterward learned that she had met the young man before going south and went there to marry him instead of teaching. This so turned Mr. Fyler against the ladies that he not only resolved not to marry, but disliked to hear anyone talking about them.6

“Fyler also patented the first wooden rotary butter churn...”7

That’s a new one—a jilted misogynist clockmaker who made butter as well.

In July of 1999 my family and I moved back to Vermont, and within a week we found ourselves sitting in a friend’s house in East Burke, a town just a few miles to the north of Lyndonville. Amongst the books in the house was a history of the town of Burke.

Since town histories are a favorite reading material of mine, I sought a comfortable chair and opened the book . . . and came right up out of the chair, scrabbling for paper and pencil when I read, on page 6, among the names of the original settlers, the name of one Roman Fyler who had moved from Connecticut to Burke Hollow in 1800. He owned and ran the first sawmills and gristmills on Fyler Brook (now Roundy Brook); was a member of a company chartered as the Passumpsic Turnpike Company to build a turnpike through the town of Barnet, south of St. Johnsbury; and a member of another company organized to push a road through the Notch of the White Mountains of New Hampshire—Crawford Notch. Roman alone is mentioned eight different times in the book, and his (abbreviated) business and personal biographies appear in at least two Vermont gazetteers and one state history—a rather prominent citizen! Orsamus Roman is mentioned but once (as Orasmus), on page 8.

I had always wondered why a Connecticut clockmaker (he is so listed by Palmer and others) had filed patents from the small Vermont towns of Chelsea and Bradford where neither of the town histories make any mention of him. Why was he in Vermont? Now I knew. But where did he apprentice—and did he indeed apprentice?—and if so, with whom? Did he return to Connecticut and work with or for Riley Whiting? Many of Whiting’s clocks have labels that refer to “Fyler’s Patent”—exactly which patent is never defined; examination alone will reveal whether it uses the escapement patent or the long-running patent, or both. The “why” had niggled at the back of my mind for years without resolution. I’ve restored tower clocks in both Chelsea and Bradford, and no one had ever heard of the Fyler name.

Regardless, his patents were filed just at about the end of the wood clock era. Whiting is considered to have been one of the very last of the major woodworks clockmakers; he died in 1835 and his widow eventually sold his factory to Lucius Clarke, William Lewis Gilbert, and other investors some six years later. Clarke and Gilbert et al. made brass clocks.

Horologically, Burke Hollow was “Nowheresville.” Clock and watch ownership is spottily preserved in the town’s tax records:

1801 - 3 watches taxed
1829 - 1 house clock and 14 watches taxed
1833 - 3 house clocks taxed
1835 - 3 house clocks and 26 watches taxed

So where did Fyler aquire his clockmaking skills? There were no clockmakers, jewelers, or machinists in Burke until 1873, years after Fyler’s death. We know that he was still in Burke in 1820—27 years old—so he never apprenticed in the normal fashion, and we know that he filed his first patent 11 years later from Chelsea, a small Vermont town whose last resident clockmaker had fled to Ohio a year earlier. In the NAWCC Bulletin article, “Eight Day Wood Shelf Clock Movements,” No. 144 (p. 129) by A. Bruce Burns, the author mentions a loose movement by Whiting that had apparently been modified by Fyler;8 therefore, he may have merely adapted an existing Whiting movement to his design and perhaps manufactured a few clocks on his own. I suspect that he may have used Whiting’s facilities to make his clocks and later granted Whiting the use of his patent(s). But it is curious that his biography in Lane Kendall Fyler’s A History and Genealogy of the Fyler Family emphasizes his commercial whetstone ventures over his clockmaking activities.

It’s clear that Orsamus began life in Connecticut, but went to Vermont with his family when he was six and probably attended the one-room school opened in 1801, a school his father helped establish and maintain. The history of Burke records that his father made several trips back to Connecticut over the years, and it was likely on one of these trips that Orsamus returned to Connecticut and possibly began working with clocks. In 1820, prior to his possible “apprenticeship” in Connecticut, Orsamus is known to have made whetstones and oilstones in Burke of stone, mined and hauled in from either a Westmore quarry or a quarry on a small island in Lake Memphremagog called Whetstone Island.9

It’s also obvious that Fyler returned to Vermont and continued to work on clocks. His first patent was filed from Chelsea, the county seat for Orange County. Chelsea wasn’t exactly a horological hotbed either: Nathan Hale made perhaps one clock after moving there from Windsor in 1807; his partner (from 1809 on) “by the halves,” Phinehas Bailey, quit clockmaking in 1816-1817, because of competition from cheap wood clocks from Connecticut, with the declaration that he was “the last brass clockmaker in New England”; and Jeremiah Dewey fled Chelsea for Ohio in about 1830. Fyler’s second patent was filed from Bradford, a few miles off to the northeast on the banks of the Connecticut River—another horological dead spot.10 It’s also curious that neither of the town histories record any Fyler presence, yet his brother Barton and three of Fyler’s half-brothers lived in Bradford, two of the latter until their deaths in 1836 and 1843 at fairly early ages. Orsamus’ name also appears on several deeds recorded in Bradford between 1828 and 1834. His tenure in Chelsea would have been rather short—perhaps two and a half to three years. He may have been the “...experienced WOODEN CLOCK Maker from Connecticut...” whom Nathan Hale mentioned hiring in a March 1, 1830, advertisement in the Vermont Advocate, but it seems highly unlikely that a 37-year-old man of “unusual intellectual powers, [who] studied especially geology and chemistry, and became interested in most scientific subjects,” would stoop to repairing wooden clocks. But it may be that Fyler needed the money—he was known to have a fondness for the grape and was somewhat  improvident as well. I find it odd that Hale should label himself “CLOCK MAKER” in this advertisement since he evidently hadn’t made any clocks since some time before 1807.11 Lane Kendall Fyler quotes a Fyler genealogical correspondent:

“Orsamus was called “Old Boss Fyler.” There is a family legend that “Old Boss Fyler” owned a quarry or considerable quarry property in Vermont—but that he was a little too fond of hard cider and signed too many notes for friends—notes on which they never made good.”

Fyler’s main claim to horological fame is the design of a striking clock that would run for eight days in a much shorter than usual case using two hammers driven by a common pinwheel, and a temperature-compensated (see Figure 2) pendulum (never patented) to correct for the likely tremendous indoor temperature swings before central heating became common. NAWCC Bulletin No. 294, p. 75, has a thorough discussion of his first patent.

Lane Kendall Fyler further wrote of Orsamus:

“He died May 16, 1867, and is buried in the private Fyler burial ground at Newfield, Connecticut. I have seen his grave and the odd thing is, in contradiction to the records I have quoted, the next stone to him says:  ‘His wife, Mary Corman (or Gorman) died Nov. 1, 1821...’ ”

One has to wonder if the legend on this stone is the literal truth or if there is little buried beneath the “next stone to him” other than the somewhat sour memory of “...a young lady who went south to teach...” whose romantic double-cross was exposed on a certain date and who therefore is memorialized as having “...died Nov. 1, 1821....”

I will leave Orsamus as I found him: “...a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma...,” and leave any further speculations to the imagination of the reader.

Figures 1A and 1B. Two views of a Fyler patent clock made and sold by Riley Whiting. The clock case is but 33" tall, yet runs for a full eight days. Note the ivory-bushed escape wheel pivot, and the eccentric mounting for the verge pin. The two strike hammers and the two-fall compounded weights are clearly seen in bottom photo.

Acknowledgments

My particular thanks to Lane Fyler of Garland, TX, for freely lending me his father’s research materials, as well as copies of pertinent pages from the Fyler genealogy compiled by his father.

And, of course, thanks to the town clerks of Chelsea and Bradford, VT, who later helped me find what few records there are of Orsamus Roman Fyler.

And last, but by no means least, Bulletin Editor Diana De Lucca, and her staff, who prepared this article for publication.

Bibliography

NAWCC Bulletin, No. 56 (December 1954): p. 313; No. 119 (December 1965): p. 40; No. 144 (February 1970): p. 143; No. 294 (February 1995): p. 75.

Burbank, Phyllis, Burke. More than Just A Mountain. Co-published by the Burke Mountain Club (Burke Historical Society) and Phyllis Burbank, 1989.

Carlisle, Lillian Baker. Vermont Clock and Watchmakers, Silversmiths, and Jewelers, 1778-1878. Lunenburg, Vermont: The Stinehour Press, 1970.

Eckhardt, George H. United States Clock and Watch Patents, 1790-1890. The Record of a Century of American Horology and Enterprise. New York: privately printed, 1960.

Fyler, Lane Kendall. A History and Genealogy of the Fyler Family. Unpublished manuscript held by his son, 1967.

Hemenway, Abby Maria, Ed. The Vermont Historical Gazetteer, Vol I. Burlington, Vermont: Miss A. M. Hemenway, 1867.

Thompson, Zadock. History of Vermont, Natural, Civil, and Statistical, in Three Parts. Burlington, Vermont: Chauncey Goodrich, 1842.

The Vermont Advocate (June 29, 1830).

Notes

1. The locations given in Richard F. O’Connell’s article, “Orsamus Roman Fyler—An Elusive Clockmaker,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 119 (December 1965): p. 40, should be “...Chelsea, and Bradford, Vermont, and Newfield, Connecticut.” James W. Gibbs, “Horology in Vermont,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 184 (October 1976): p. 433, writes of Fyler as Orsamus J. Tyler.

2. George Eckhardt, United States Clock and Watch Patents, 1790-1890. The Record of a Century of American Horology and Enterprise (New York: privately published, 1960). Fyler is the Orsamus J. Tyler given by Gibbs. Incidentally, the listings in this book have been scanned and have been made available to the NAWCC Library and Research Center for a quick computerized search.

3. See also Snowden Taylor, “Research Activities and News,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 294 (February 1995): p. 75, for the text of his first patent. Somehow copies of these two patents ended up in the Franklin Institute Library in Philadelphia, where Mr. Eckhardt found them.

4. Hannah Fyler died of complications of childbirth on November 14, 1795, and Roman married a Mrs. Sally Lyman (widow) in Newfield on March 26, 1797. If some of this material sounds familiar, both Paul Hollingshead, “Fyler’s Patent,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 56 (December 1954): p. 313, and I are quoting from the same material.

5. Turkey stone is a stone imported from Turkey. It is a novaculite, a hard, extremely fine-grained siliceous rock known in this country as Arkansas stone.

6. Franklin Moore’s letter to “Vox Temporis,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 59 (June 1955) p. 544, is in error. Moore wrote that “[Fyler] undoubtedly married as a probable offspring named O. R. Fyler was the Manager of a trolley line between Torrington and Winstead, Conn. around 1900.” The name is the same, but this Orsamus was not a descendant.

7. Paul Hollingshead, “Fyler’s Pat-ent,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 56 (December 1954): p. 313.

8. This article has the best description of Fyler’s redesign; therefore, I will leave it to the interested reader to look up the article.

9. A telephone conversation with Fyler’s son suggests that the source of the whetstone raw material is Westmore, just to the northwest of Burke Hollow. My wife, who teaches geology at the local college, located a quarry for me in Westmore, but it doesn’t appear to be the source of the Magag oil stone.

10. There was no clockmaking activity in Bradford, but Dudley Carlton, John Osgood’s step-uncle made cases for Osgood’s tall clocks in that town in the early 1800s. See Donn Haven Lathrop, “John Osgood, Master and Maker,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 324 (February 2000): p. 46.

11. See Donn Haven Lathrop, “Phinehas Bailey, a Vermont Clockmaker, Tinker, Inventor, Minister...,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 315 (August 1998): p. 461.

 About the Author

Donn Haven Lathrop retired from the U.S. Navy as a Training Devicesman Chief Petty Officer. An electronics specialist, he taught and worked with electronics, and electro/hydraulic systems applied to helicopter flight and weapons systems simulators, including the very first digital computer-driven helicopter simulator, and later wrote specifications for the procurement of state-of-the-art helicopter simulators.

Donn is the author of numerous articles for the Bulletin. His primary interest is in the history of clocks and their makers, with a particular emphasis on the New England states.