Seth Thomas clock

  Since creating this webpage we have moved to another house and this clock came with us. The below photos are from the last house. See clock in current house.

This is a Seth Thomas clock we have that I guess you'd call a family heirloom. The clock was manufactured in 1892 in Thomaston, Connecticut, and shipped to a customer in Walla Walla, Washington (the story goes that the clock came in a covered-wagon that actually got partially submerged in the Mississippi River). My mother's great-grandfather, John Boyer, was a Washington state banker, and the clock was used as collateral on a loan to the owner. The loan was defaulted and the clock became the property of Mr. Boyer (banking must have been a family business in those days), and for years it was in the stairway landing of the Boyer house in Seattle. The family owned partial interest in a hotel in downtown Seattle, the Calhoun Hotel, and in 1921 the clock was mounted on the wall in the hotel lobby. My grandparents managed that hotel and I used to go there as a child (my mother was a Boyer), and I probably saw the clock at that time. In the late 1960s the family interest in the hotel was sold and the clock was shipped to my parents in Payette, Idaho. A suitable location in our house was not found for the clock, so it was hung in the bank where my father was the manager. In 1978 my parents moved to Boise and the clock came with them and was hung on the wall in their townhouse. My father died in 1993 and in 2007 my mother sold the townhouse and moved to a senior citizen complex, and the clock was shipped to us in Hingham, Massachusetts, meaning it has gone full circle—East Coast to West Coast to East Coast again. We lived in our previous house where the clock hung on the wall in the photo below, and now it hangs on the wall in the living room of our current house where I enjoy winding it every week. (A funny part of this clock story is that when my mother shipped it cross-country to us she insured it for $600. When I Googled the clock I saw that the same clock had sold for $39,500! Good thing we didn't have to file a claim on the shipment of that clock.)

 
These photos are from the house we lived in 1982-2016—see clock in current house