Hoadley, Silas, 1786-1870

Hoadley, a clockmaker who worked in Hoadleyville and Plymouth, Connecticut, from ca. 1808 to 1849, shifted from tall case clocks to shelf clocks with wooden movements, often of his own design, around 1820. An early partnership with Seth Thomas dissolved around 1813.

Seth Thomas, possibly the best-known of the nineteenth-century Connecticut clock manufacturers, started his career in partnership with Silas Hoadley and Eli Terry and began his own shop in 1813. He apparently purchased the patent rights from Eli Terry to make wooden movements and the "pillar and scroll" shelf clock model and later adopted the brass movements introduced by the Chaunceys. In 1850 his factory near Bristol, Connecticut in a town renamed Thomaston in 1865 produced 24,000 brass movement clocks. The Seth Thomas Clock Company continued as Seth Thomas & Sons after his death in 1859.

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