Willard House: Where the American Banjo Clock Was Born
Near Worcester, Massachusetts
In the rolling hills of Grafton, Massachusetts, four brothers named Willard grew up in a farmhouse built in seventeen eighteen and became the most celebrated clockmakers in early American history. Working out of a small workshop attached to the homestead, Benjamin, Simon, Ephraim, and Aaron Willard were producing fine clocks by seventeen sixty-six.
Simon, the most inventive of the four, invented the wall-hung timepiece we now call the banjo clock and patented it in eighteen oh two. The slender shape, the painted glass tablet, the brass fittings: that design became the defining American clock of the Federal period and was copied by hundreds of makers.
Today the original homestead operates as the Willard House and Clock Museum, displaying over ninety Willard-made clocks in the rooms where the brothers learned their trade. A reconstructed workshop on the original site shows how Simon and his brothers worked.
