New Haven Clock Company

133 Hamilton Street (partially demolished)

The story of clock production in the area between downtown and the mouth of the Mill River touches on all aspects of New Haven’s social, cultural, and economic history. Manufacturer Chauncey Jerome moved his clock company from Bristol to New Haven in 1884, settling on a two-acre site on the outskirts of Wooster Square. Jerome had begun his career apprenticing with renowned Connecticut clockmaker Eli Terry. Thanks to his discovery of a method of stamping rather than casting gears, Jerome was able to produce the lowest-priced clocks in the world at the time. He became wealthy as a manufacturer and leveraged his meteoric financial success into political influence, serving as a state legislator and mayor of New Haven.

The women are boxing finished pocket watches while the young man in the foreground is doing some final assembling c. 1900. Photo courtesy of Bill Kraus.

Jerome’s fortunes ran out in 1856 when he lost control of the clock company after a failed merger with a rival company controlled by circus impresario P.T. Barnum. Bankrupted and humiliated, Jerome left New Haven and died in poverty in 1868.

Jerome’s original Greek Revival wood factory (located on the St. John Street side of the existing complex) burned down in 1866 and was immediately replaced with a larger neoclassical brick building that is the oldest wing of the factory still standing today.

The factory grew in an ad hoc, organic manner, with buildings being built and expanded, or torn down and rebuilt, numerous times between 1866 and 1937. At its greatest extent, the factory was more than twice the size of the existing complex. It had 28 interconnected buildings on both sides of Hamilton Street, connected by a sky bridge. The complex was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2017.

In the early 1900s, the clock company flourished under the management of Walter Camp, who ran the factory while simultaneously coaching the football team at Yale College. During this period the company became one of the largest clockmakers in the world and the neighborhood’s dominant employer, with as many as 2,000 workers turning out 500,000 timepieces every year. Its presence in the neighborhood drew immigrant workers from all over the world and supported a wide range of businesses centered on the commercial strip of Inner Grand Avenue. Factory workers and their families lived in tenement-style housing on the avenue as well as modest one- and two-family houses on side streets.

During World War I, the factory produced glow-in-the-dark watches with radium-laced dials for servicemen overseas. Some of the workers were young women who became known as “Radium Girls” because they experienced radiation poisoning or other health complications as a result of their work. During World War II, the company produced timing fuses and relays for mines, resuming clock production after the end of the war. Increasing foreign competition and slackening demand led to the factory’s closure in 1956. Buildings on the west side of Hamilton Street were demolished in the 1960s to accommodate the construction of I-91.

After a period of abandonment, the clock factory complex enjoyed a second life in the 1980s and 1990s as inexpensively rented loft spaces that attracted raucous nightlife, punk rock venues, “adult” entertainment, motorcycle clubs, an indoor skate park, and counterculture activities of all kinds. In 2018 it was slated for redevelopment as residential lofts for artists but its fate is currently uncertain.

It has recently been purchased by the Elm City Communities (formerly the Housing Authority of New Haven).

Text sources: Carriages and Clocks, Corsets and Locks: The Rise and Fall of an Industrial City—New Haven, Connecticut, Edited by Preston Maynard and Marjorie B. Noyes, Hanover, N.H, University Press of New England, 2004, pp. 171-176; Link; Video: Interviews with Bill Kraus by SCSU Journalism students and Rhoda Zahler Samuel, 2019-2021.