The Time Museum: Every Clock That Ever Mattered

Seth Atwood made his money in manufacturing, the kind of money that northern Illinois industry could still generate in the postwar decades. What he spent it on was time. Not leisure time. Not retirement. Clocks.

By the nineteen sixties, Atwood had become what serious collectors called a student of horological history, a phrase that means he was obsessed in a disciplined way with the instruments human beings have built to measure their own passing hours. He began buying examples systematically, not decoratively. His goal was to represent every fundamental turning point in the history of timekeeping, from the earliest water clocks of the ancient world to the atomic timekeepers of the twentieth century.

In nineteen seventy-one, Atwood opened the Time Museum at the Clock Tower Resort on the east side of Rockford. By the nineteen eighties it held nearly fifteen hundred pieces. A library and conservation department were added. A curator named William Andrewes, who joined in nineteen seventy-seven, spent a decade expanding both the collection and the scholarship around it. The museum became internationally known among the small world of people who took the history of timekeeping seriously, and broader audiences came to Rockford specifically because of it.

The collection included a working astronomical clock from the sixteenth century, sundials, water clocks, marine chronometers, pocket watches of every era, and instruments that had helped navigators find their longitude at sea.

The museum closed in March of nineteen ninety-nine when the Atwood family's company sold it. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago displayed most of the collection from two thousand one to two thousand four, and the pieces were later sold at auction. The Clock Tower itself was demolished years later.

For twenty-eight years, Rockford had the best clock collection in the world.