In Blog, General

An old clock sits on a mantleThe inscription reads —

“Presented to J & G (last name) on the Golden Anniversary of their wedding with the loving congratulations and warm esteem of your friends and fellow members of Plymouth Meeting.”

They were Quakers. Quakers called their groups “meetings”, not congregations. Plymouth Meeting was the group at Plymouth Rock. That’s a bit of history! The date on the engraved plate? May 15, 1885!

This means I now have a clock presented to a couple that was married in 1835. Amazing!

I bought the clock in southeastern Wisconsin. It weighs about 30 pounds. How, when and why it got from Plymouth Rock to SE Wisconsin are unknown, but somebody (or somebodies) must have moved west.

The clock was offered at an estate auction of a man who owned a jewelry store and clock repair business. The clock was, at some point, brought to him for repair, then never picked up.

Amazing, again, that it was never picked up! The clock was not repaired and does not run. Amazing, too, that it was not repaired. Maybe the jeweler died before he could get to it. But why didn’t the family retrieve it then?

We didn’t try to find the family. The search might have been fruitless. There was no identifying tag with the clock.

Should we have searched? We debated it, then decided “let bygones be bygones” and let it rest.

We’re comfortable with that.

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