By Janet M. Conner

Connecticut has a proud tradition of early clock making.  Some of these early clockmakers in Farmington, Unionville, and Avon used their trade as a vehicle to promote their antislavery position. One such clockmaking firm was Williams, Orton, and Preston & Co. in Unionville.  Another was Seymour, Hall and Company, the successor of Seymour, Williams, and Porter, Unionville.  Austin F. Williams, of this firm, was a known abolitionist.  In Avon, the firm of Wheeler and Company peddled clocks in the 1830s and may have supported the cause.  Peddlers employed by these firms who traveled outside of New England to the south and west also brought with them the antislavery ideology of their employers.   Historian Joseph Rainer noted, “…southerners viewed Yankee peddlers as firebrands who disseminated abolitionist doctrines among blacks and non-slaveholders,” and eyed the peddlers, according to a Charleston newspaper, as akin to “political missionaries.”[1]

Mary Jane Dapkus observed, “Perhaps no other maker of American wood- and brass-movement shelf clocks of the 1830s and 1840s possessed stronger ties to the antislavery movement than Farmington’s Williams, Orton, Preston & Co.”[2] Heman Orton, Noah Preston, Henry C. Bull, and Williams, plus the brother of Noah, John S. Preston, were subscribers to the Charter Oak, an antislavery mouthpiece.[3] Young men, sometimes sons who would not inherit property or who needed to supplement their incomes when farming was out of season, became clock peddlers. Timothy Colvin and DeForest Wolcott peddled clocks for Seth Wheeler of Seth Wheeler and Company of Avon.[4] Nathan Lee Case and Daniel M. Alford were also clock peddlers, employer unknown.[5] Dan D. Derrin (Derren) and his brother Ammi, both of West Avon, and Chester Randolph Woodford and Joseph Bishop, of East Avon, were also peddlers as will be discussed below. Avon’s Romanta Woodruff, who would later become wealthy selling cider brandy, also sold clocks as a young man.[6]

Dan (Daniel) D. Derrin of early Avon later became a Whig and Representative to the State Legislature. In a letter written by Dan and his brother Ammi to their parents, Timothy and Polly, in 1841, they mention they had been selling clocks in the Arkansas area, and that it was difficult to collect money, saying it was “like pulling eye teeth.”[7] 

Chester Randolph Woodford and his uncle Joseph Bishop went westward selling clocks.  They worked for a branch of Unionville’s Williams, Orton and Preston & Co. in West Alton, Illinois.[8] A statute in Illinois prohibited clocks “manufactured” out of state from being sold in its territories.  The loophole that this clockmaker devised was making parts in Connecticut but having the clocks assembled in Illinois.  Mr. Woodford and Mr. Bishop were arrested for selling clocks and faced a trial.  Mr. Woodford came across the law office of ‘Abraham Lincoln, Lawyer’, and hired him for his defense.  Abraham Lincoln, the future president, won the case based on the loophole.[9] It is reasonable to posit that Chester Randolph may have also had antislavery beliefs.  His father’s brother, Amasa Woodford, was a known abolitionist.[10]

It is apparent that these antislavery clockmakers were not in business solely to get rich from clocks, but found that using peddlers to spread their message was “expedient,” and the perfect side hustle to spread their propaganda to incite unrest. In those days before social media, employers sent brochures and pamphlets with their peddlers, as well as having them elucidate the cause. [11]  “The peddlers exercised their insidious and oily tongues not just to sell goods, but to sway the minds of non-slaveholders in South Carolina against the institution of slavery,” chimed the Camden and Lancaster Beacon.[12] Southern slave owners became very leery of peddlers who interacted face to face with blacks and poor whites.  There were attempts by some states to charge excessively high prices for licenses to sell, however this was not an effective deterrent.  Rainer quotes a letter from the governor of Virginia, John Floyd, to South Carolina’s Governor James Hamilton, Jr., Floyd reveals the effectiveness of northern clockmakers in disseminating their message to instigate social change.  The letter was written after the infamous Nat Turner’s Revolt in 1831 in Southampton Co. Virginia, in which approximately sixty whites and many Blacks were killed.  Floyd wrote, “…the spirit of insubordination…had its origin among, and emanated from the Yankee population…but more especially the Yankee peddlers and traders who circulated inflammatory papers and pamphlets among the enslaved people of Virginia.”[13]

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[1]Joseph T. Rainer. “The honorable fraternity of moving merchants: Yankee peddlers in the Old South, 1800-1860” (PhD diss., College of William and Mary, 2000), 236.

[2] Mary Jane Dapkus, “American Clockmakers and Slavery to 1860: Part 2”, Journal of the National Association of Clock and Watch Collectors 66, No. 468 (2024): 153.

[3] Dapkus, 153.

[4] Mary Frances L. Mackie, Avon, Connecticut, An Historical Story (Phoenix, AZ: Phoenix Publishing, 1988), 109.

[5] Mackie, 110.

[6] Mabel S. Hulburt, Farmington Town Clerks And Their Times (Bloomfield: Press of Finlay Brothers, 1943), 328.

[7] William Griffing, “1841: Dan D. Derrin and Ammi Derrin to Timothy Derrin”, Spared and Shared 1: Old Letters Spared From Obscurity.

[8] Mabel Roberts Moore, “Early Clockmakers In Connecticut: Evolution From Era of Craftsmanship to Machinery Age With Terry, Hoadley and Seth Thomas,” The Hartford Courant, April 19, 1931, E5.

[9] “Avon Man Gave ‘A. Lincoln, Lawyer,’ Case And Won: Chester Randolph Woodford 106 Years Old, October 26th Arrested In Illinois, He Employed Lincoln At Time When ‘Abe’ Needed Clients,” The Hartford Courant, October 17, 1920: X2.

[10] “Signed Abolition Paper Years Ago: Elias Burwell Of Briston Remembers Incident Probably Only One Living Out of 1770 Signers Document Called Anti-Slavery Meeting At Hartford,” The Hartford Courant, December 26, 1907:13.

[11] Dapkus, 152.

[12] Camden and Lancaster Beacon, 4/12/1831.

[13] John Floyd to James Hamilton, Jr., 11/19/1831, in Henry Irving Tragle, ed., The Southampton Slave Revolt o f 1831: A Compilation of Source Material (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1971), 275; “Speech of Governor Floyd to the Virginia Legislature,” Niles Weekly Register, quoted in Rainer, 350.

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