The Familiar Tick-Tock of Heirloom Southern Clocks

A new exhibition at Colonial Williamsburg showcases how Southerners have kept time through the ages

Today, it only takes a quick glance at a smart phone to know exactly what time it is, down to the second. “But it wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that clocks became more accessible and showed a more accurate time,” says Tara Chicirda, the furniture curator at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. Around this time, Southerners began decorating their homes with tall case clocks—dark wood heirloom pieces most often thought of today as grandfather clocks. Clockmakers crafted the weight-driven movements out of brass or wood before cabinetmakers sheathed those inner workings in tall, decorative cases. Keeping Time, a new exhibition at the DeWitt Wallace Decorative Arts Museum at Colonial Williamsburg, opens on November 14, showcasing a ticking timeline of these clocks in both the United States and England and highlighting nearly a dozen Southern-made and -used clocks. Grand clocks, with their regional styles that included meticulously painted figures and inlaid wooden elements, revolutionized both home décor and the fabric of a person’s day. “Before these clocks became popular, there were quarter hours, half hours, and hours,” Chicirda says. “To the common person in the early and even mid 1800s, minutes and seconds were a completely new idea.”