Fine Pocket Watches
and Railroad Timepieces

This country ran on pocket watches. Standard time exists because the railroads needed it, but it never stopped at the railroads — factories, banks, schoolrooms, anybody whose day had to line up with somebody else’s. Building them accurate enough, and by the million, pushed American manufacturing further than almost anything else of its age. What I’m doing here is honoring that work — how well it was made, and how far it carried us.

For about seventy years, American factories were the best in the world at this. Hamilton in Lancaster, Elgin outside Chicago, Waltham in Massachusetts, Illinois in Springfield — turning them out by the million. The railroads get the credit, and they earned it, but most of these never went near a train. They went into an ordinary man’s pocket, and they were the finest thing he owned and the one he used every day. Turning up when you said you would was taken as the measure of a man, and that took a watch. That era is over. The machinery was scrapped, the skills went with the men who had them, and nothing has been built to that standard in this country since.

What I look for is originality — the dial as the factory enamelled it, the case that movement left the maker in, hands that belong to the watch. Those are the ones worth keeping, and they get harder to find every year. Every watch here is serviced, warrantied for a year, and carries my personal guarantee.