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Excerpted from a NAWCC
Bulletin article which appeared in the April 2001 issue.
This article does not appear here in its
entirety.

The Search for
Great Watch Collections

An Opportunity to See One of the
Great Watch Collections from the Past—and a Search for
Other Vintage American Collections

Kathleen
H. Pritchard (MD)

(page
3 of
3)

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).

About the Author

Kathleen Pritchard has been a member of NAWCC since
1975. However, she participated in NAWCC activities with
her late husband Wilbur long before becoming a member
herself.

She spent her working career as a librarian and had a
librarian’s curiosity as to why so little information
was available about Swiss watch companies. In 1997, she
authored the two-volume work, Swiss Timepiece Makers
1775-1975. In 2000 she received the Prix Gaïa from
the Musée International d’Horlogerie in La Chaux de
Fonds, Switzerland, for this work.

Kathy has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of
Toronto, and an M.A. from Harvard, also in Fine Arts
(museum work). She is a Fellow and a Silver Star of the
NAWCC and from 1982-1992 was an NAWCC Museum Trustee.
Kathy travels from her home in Bethesda, Maryland, each
week to the Library and Research Center at the NAWCC
where she volunteers her time and helps to answer
watch-related research questions. She was twice NAWCC
Volunteer of the Year, is a member of a number of NAWCC
chapters and has been both President and Secretary of
Chapter 12 and 120. She is also a member of the Answer
Box Team for the
Bulletin.

Last
Updated:  March
14, 2005

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