Fine Pocket Watches
and Railroad Timepieces

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.

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. But millions made does not mean millions worth having: the great majority were plain grades, and only a small share left the factory at the top of its horological ability — the high-jewel, closely adjusted, finely finished movements a maker built for the man who wanted the best it could do.

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. The railroads get the credit, and they earned it, but most of these never went near a train — 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 like it in this country since. The finest horological advances of the age were made right here in America, and they still stand the test of time — that standard is what I try to preserve and honor.