Cross & Beguelin Swiss Pocket Watch (1890)

About this Swiss

Picture Maiden Lane in 1890, the busiest watch block in America, where every door opens on a dealer or a case shop or an importer just back from Switzerland with a trunk of movements. Cross and Beguelin had been working that street since the Civil War, two partners, one from Maine and one from Le Locle, selling their own private-label Swiss watches to a country that could not get enough of them. This one is theirs: a size 18 open-face watch produced in 1890, Swiss movement, nickel silver case, the Maltese cross trademark the firm registered in 1884 stamped where another maker would have put its name. A genuine working relic of the Lane.

Inside beats a 7-jewel Swiss ebauche in bright nickel finish, built to the robust size 18 standard American buyers wanted in a working-man's pocket watch. There is no factory signature on the plates and no serial number, and that is exactly right for the piece. Houses that bought ebauches by the trunkload didn't want them signed by anyone but themselves, and the Maltese cross was all the maker's mark the firm thought this watch needed. A hundred and thirty-six years on, it still runs as it should.

The case is nickel silver, bright and crisp, and it was Cross and Beguelin's favored material for watches of this grade. Hard-wearing, silvery in the hand without the cost of coin silver, it is the reason so many of their survivors still show as well as this one does. The shape is plain open-face, the sort of case a tradesman in 1890 would have been quietly pleased to draw from his vest pocket, and more than a century later it has held its lines and its shine beautifully.

This one is pin-set, and if you have never handled a watch set this way it is worth a moment. There is no crown pulled out to move the hands. Look at the case band right beside the stem and you will find a tiny pin recessed into the metal; press it in with a fingernail and the crown now turns the hands instead of the mainspring. Release the pin and winding resumes. It was a clever, inexpensive alternative to lever setting, common on Swiss imports of the 1880s and 1890s, and it still works exactly as it was meant to.

1890 was the year the frontier closed. The U.S. Census Bureau announced that the line between settled country and wilderness no longer existed, and a page of American history turned with the stroke of a pen. Benjamin Harrison was in the White House, Idaho came into the Union as the 43rd state in July, and the country was tipping out of its restless rural youth into the industrial century ahead. On Maiden Lane the watch trade was at full tilt, and Cross and Beguelin were among its most established houses, selling the Centennial line to a nation that wanted a Swiss watch in an American pocket.

The watch is excellent across the board, the enamel dial bright white and unbroken with its numerals still sharp, the nickel silver case crisp and clean, the movement showing only light discoloration from age and running strong. Watches from the Maiden Lane importers don't surface often in this kind of shape, and when they do they make wonderful carry pieces and better conversation. This is a tangible scrap of nineteenth-century New York you can wind and slip into a pocket, and that is a rare and beautiful thing.

All Vintage Pocket Watches are cleaned, oiled and adjusted for accuracy and warranted for one full year from the date of purchase.