Bristol, Connecticut: Clock Town
Near Hartford, Connecticut
For more than a century, Bristol kept time for the world. Elias Ingraham, a cabinetmaker and clock-case designer, started the business that became the E. Ingraham Company here in eighteen thirty-one, and the E.
Ingraham Company grew into one of the premier American clock manufacturers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bristol was part of a broader Connecticut clock-making industry, alongside Seth Thomas, Waterbury Clock, and New Haven Clock, that dominated the national and international market for affordable mantel and wall clocks. Ingraham operated until nineteen sixty-seven.
The American Clock and Watch Museum, still operating in Bristol, preserves the industry's output: thousands of timepieces from the age when Connecticut literally set the time.
