In the course of my research on the clockmakers of New England, with a short digression into the Western Reserve,¹ I continually encountered the name Hiram Powers, and felt that some further investigation should be done. In his article “Horology in Vermont,” (NAWCC Bulletin, No. 184: p. 433) James W. Gibbs listed “Hiram Powers, Woodstock, Vt. 1822 - 1828,” as a Vermont maker. In his article on “Hollow-Column Clocks” (NAWCC Bulletin, No. 191: p. 619) Gibbs mentions Powers as an assistant to Luman Watson, “skilled in modelling figures...[who] went on to become one of America’s first great sculptors.” As far as we know, Powers never made a clock, although he was apprenticed to a clockmaker. What was the connection, and who was Hiram Powers? Annie Hoge Lockett wrote of Powers in the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio Bulletin,² from which Mr. Gibbs evidently extracted his material.

Born of stern Congregationalist stock, son of a poor blacksmith-farmer, Hiram Powers of Woodstock, Vermont, moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he apprenticed with Luman Watson, and married and fathered the first of nine children. He then emigrated to Florence, Italy, via Washington, D.C., where he later adopted the religious principles of Swedenborgian-ism—a cult claiming to have special revelations from the Almighty that also dabbled in spiritualism—to which Watson also belonged. He modeled busts and statues of the famous and the merely wealthy, carved nudes in the finest of Carrara and Seravezza marbles, survived an assassination attempt by a deranged young man from South Carolina, and became a knight of the Order of the Rose by decree of the Emperor of Brazil.

His statue of a “Greek Slave”—a fixture of that barely endurable (or appreciated, depending on your viewpoint) “Art History 101” course—was a best-seller in the middle of the Victorian era, even though she wore nothing more than shackles and chains. Even Queen Victoria approved!

To digress for a minute: Victorianism was publicly characterized by darkly massive pieces of furniture in dark and dreary parlors, and a drearily excessive prudery about any display of the actual human form in day-to-day life. In private it was a rather licentious era and yet was the time when the mere public glimpse of an ankle would give the keepers (oddly enough, usually male) of the public morals absolute hissy fits! Flamboyant hats, nipped-in waists, and tremendous bustles or hoop skirts were the disguises of the day: it is difficult to imagine wearing a six-foot hoop skirt, with an 18-inch waist laced up in a lung- and liver-compressing whaleboned corset, topped off with a two-pound hat. Although some may say that the pendulum of the dress and display of the human form has swung a bit too far in the opposite direction, Victorianism is best left today to memory and antique collectors.

Hiram was born on July 29, 1805, to Stephen and Sarah (Perry) Powers, the eighth of nine children. His early education consisted of five years in the district school (in 1841; as his star rose in the firmament of the arts, the University of Vermont conferred on him an honorary degree—of Master of Arts), where his early abilities in drawing and working in clay were fascinating to his fellow students.

Hiram’s father lost his farm to a cosigned note on which a friend defaulted in 1816—known as “1816 and froze to death”—the year without a summer. Penniless, two years later the family followed the oldest son, Benjamin, to Cincinnati, Ohio, where they lived in a literal shack in a swamp just northeast of the city. Typhus soon claimed Stephen Powers, leaving the family totally destitute. At the age of 14, Hiram went to work overseeing a reading room—a “center of culture” in a local hotel, where one could catch up on the latest newspapers and literature (for a fee). By this time he was in rags; he later wrote that he would walk to work with “my arms pressed to my sides to hide the holes and rips in my clothing.” His poor appearance was instrumental in ending this job, and he found work in a grocery store. In his (probably sneaked) leisure moments, Hiram would remove the cover of a tub of butter and “sculpt the ductile esculent into such horrid forms as gasping ‘loggerheads’³ and irate rattlesnakes,” replace the cover, and wait for some unwary soul to remove it. The store closed a year later. There is no record that the buttery horrors had anything to do with its failure.

In 1822, through the influence of his brother Benjamin, Hiram apprenticed to Luman Watson, a Cincinnati clockmaker and organ builder, with whom he worked for nearly six years. Watson himself had emigrated to Ohio in the early 1800s, by 1815 was manufacturing clocks in Cincinnati, and began building pipe organs in about 1821. He fell under the influence of Adam Hurdus, manufacturer, merchant, organ builder, clockmaker, and Swedenborgian minister. Watson later moved from Cincinnati to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where an Owensite colony was established in 1825. Owenism, a form of communalism, was to be combined in this colony with the precepts of Swedenborgianism, to form a community dedicated to Christian communalism, but it failed within the year.

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