![]() ![]() After Barnum died in 1891, his wife shipped it to her family’s farm in Huntsville, Texas, where it sat in a warehouse, untouched, for more than 70 years. It sat, displayed in a German castle, until one day Barnum saw the piece and became enamored with it, and made a deal with the owner. The clock portion was built in 1790 in southwest Germany’s Black Forest, and the owner added an organ and a desk, made of flame mahogany overlaid on linden wood, in the mid 1800s. Barnum clock is, unsurprisingly but notably, an unwieldy all-wood clock organ with gold hands, an automaton group of musicians and angels, and oil paintings depicting Bible scenes, that sits atop a desk, owned at one point by the famous showman. Barnum clock,” he says, that has given the horologist the most trouble. Fair enough.īut the real answer to my question is the clock he’s saved for last. This clock, he tells me, pointing to a clock that looks like a banjo, is called a banjo clock. The gold “death clock” Galbraith owns is called that because the gilders who worked on that type of timepiece didn’t wear masks and many died from mercury poisoning. This is obvious.”Īmerican clockmaking was impacted by the British embargo on brass, so many early New England clocks are made from wood foraged from the nearby forests. “The man didn’t know what he had,” Galbraith says. In 1976, in celebration of the Bicentennial, 1,000 reproductions of Franklin’s creation were fabricated, and years later, Galbraith found one in a junk pile at a convention in Houston. No one in America would touch it, so in 1740, the newly formed Thwaites & Reed made exactly one and stuck it in a museum. The grandfather clock is actually called a tall-case, and only became known as such after 1876, when Henry Clary Work wrote a song called “My Grandfather’s Clock,” about one “too large for the shelf” that sat on the floor of his grandfather’s house for more than 90 years.īenjamin Franklin once drew up blueprints for a bonkers-looking clock, one with a different tooth-count and where an hour passing looks like 15 minutes, and it only rotates completely every four hours. I learn things I’d never known about clocks. He gives me a private tour on a Friday (the free museum is open only to walk-ins on Saturdays), taking me through the sectioned off rooms, divided by region: America, Great Britain, and France and Germany. As we walk, Galbraith, BM ’71, dressed in gray slacks and a navy blazer, with neatly parted, bone-white hair, looks every bit the docent that he - by default - is. We’re in downtown Lockhart, the Hill Country town known more for fatty brisket and jalapeño sausage than horological wonders, inside the new location of the Southwest Museum of Clocks and Watches, which Galbraith founded 10 years ago this March. ![]() ![]() “They’re all trouble,” says Gene Galbraith, with a laugh, when I ask him which of his dozens of antique clocks hanging from the walls or standing proud in their tall cases on the floor of his palace is the most difficult to keep running. ![]()
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