Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Now we come to the story of the OG clock, probably as important if not more important
than Eli Terry and his pillar and scroll clocks. In the late eighteen-thirties, a serious economic
recession hit the country, and all these wooden works clock makers were starting to go out
of business. They couldn't make 'em cheap enough, there weren't enough customers for
them. One of the clock makers was Chauncey Jerome, down there in Connecticut, and he
claims in a dream he thought of how to make an inexpensive brass works clock, so that
those brass movement clocks didn't have to be the expensive ones, compared to the inexpensive
wooden work ones. He dreamt up, with his brothers help, Noble Jerome, the OG clock. OG is actually
named after ogee, or ogive molding, this reverse "s" curve here that you see on mirrors, as
well as on OG clocks. But a relatively inexpensive clock to make, all around. There are almost
always thirty hour, daily wind, so the movements don't have to be that complicated. Nice, big
opening here so that you can see that it's a brass clock, and not one of those old-fashioned
wooden works clocks. Nice, multi-color, often eglomise reverse paint glass in the door.
Sometimes there's mirrors here, but mirrors were much more expensive at the time than
just having some young woman paint a pretty picture here, or even use some sort of stencil
to do that with. So, OG clocks saved the Connecticut clock industry. They were inexpensive to make.
People could buy them even during hard economic times, and a lot of people started to make
a lot of money making these. Again, we want to open the door. We do have the label in
there, it's a little bit tired, perhaps with some water damage, but there's enough there
to see that this was an Ansonia clock. We'll talk more about the Ansonia Clock Company
later, but the label exists in there, even with the little image of the early Ansonia
clock factory. So you're getting a history lesson in your label, as well as one important
early American clock that was important to American industry overall.