SUNAPEE — Whittier Perkins wasn’t widely known during his lifetime, though he served as a selectman in Wendell, N.H., which was Sunapee’s name until 1850.
He moved to Wendell in 1788 from Methuen, Mass., with his father, stepmother, brother and sister. At some point, perhaps before the move to New Hampshire, Perkins trained with clockmakers in Ashby, Mass., an early center of clockmaking in the United States. It’s unclear how many clocks Perkins made, from his home in Sunapee.
Recently, one of his clocks came to the attention of the Sunapee Historical Society, where a member was researching Perkins’ house, which still stands, and a contact said, “ ‘Oh, by the way, Delaney’s has one of his clocks,’ ” Becky Rylander, president of the historical society, said in a recent phone interview.
The historical society contacted Delaney Antique Clocks, in West Townsend, Mass., and is now in the process of raising money to buy the clock and bring it back to Sunapee for display. The clock has the name Wendell on its face, marking it as an artifact of the town’s early history, and it will be “the oldest complex item we’ll have in our collection,” Rylander said.
The historical society seldom purchases items for its collections, but the clock merits the fundraising effort, Rylander said. The purchase price is $9,000, a considerable sum for a nonprofit, all-volunteer historical society, but not anywhere near the high end of the antique clock trade, which ranges into six figures.
What makes the clock so interesting, in addition to its provenance, is that its movement is made of wood. After the American Revolution, Great Britain refused to sell brass to its former colonies. Brass had military uses, but it was also the material most clock movements were made of. So clockmakers turned to wood, usually hardwoods such as oak, maple and cherry, to shape gears for the clockworks.
Most of those early clockmakers, working before and shortly after 1800, were producing clocks by hand and either selling them to people in their immediate area or entrusting them to peddlers, who would take the movement, dial, weights and pendulum and try to sell them, said John Delaney, who with his brother, Sean, forms the second generation of Delaney Antique Clocks, which has been in business for 55 years.
The shop deals in clocks that were made by individuals, Delaney said. Even wooden works clocks were eventually mass-produced, mainly in factories in Connecticut, but for a time, a clock made by hand by someone like Whittier Perkins was the only option.
That meant clocks were expensive in Perkins’ day. A clock with brass works cost around $60, at a time when most people made around $30 a year, Delaney said. Eventually, as the brass industry developed in Connecticut’s Naugatuck Valley, brass workings replaced wooden ones. There was a practical reason for that, Delaney said. Brass workings needed to be wound every eight days, while a clock with wooden gears had to be wound daily. That’s part of the reason when wooden clocks typically sell for much less than brass ones.
The Whittier Perkins clock is only the third that Delaney has seen, he said. Made circa 1805, it’s a rare piece for a couple of reasons. It has the town name, Wendell, on its face, along with Perkins’ name, a sign that it was made for someone in the area. It came to Delaney from a home in the Sunapee area. It also has an unusually primitive case. While clockmakers turned out the works, cases were usually made by someone else, often a cabinetmaker local to the clock’s purchaser. The Perkins clock is austere, with straight lines and little ornamentation, suggesting it might have been made by a casketmaker.
The Sunapee Historical Society owns the former town library, which provides a climate-controlled place for the Perkins clock, Rylander said.
Most clocks are sold to private collectors and aren’t often viewed by the public despite their importance as talismans of early American industry and craftsmanship, Delaney said.
“This is a great treat to us to sell a clock to a place that we think is a perfect fit for it,” Delaney said. “It’s going to be seen.”
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
