Willard House and Clock Museum
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The Willard House and Clock Museum, located in North Grafton, Massachusetts, USA, is the former farm homestead of the Willard brothers (Benjamin, Simon, Ephraim, and Aaron), who made clocks there in the late 18th century, before they moved the business to Roxbury, where they became pillars of the emerging American clockmaking industry. The house was built about 1718.
Like other contemporaneous horologists, the Willard family originally divided its life seasonally, between farming and the clock workshop. Eventually the business became profitable, at which point the house was further enlarged. While in Grafton, Simon, the most innovative and most famous of the Willard brothers, developed his first so called banjo clock, more properly called the "Willard Patent Timepiece", which was patented in 1802.
After living on the farm, at some point Simon became independent while still living in the Grafton region. Some surviving clocks have dials reading "Simon Willard, Grafton." The house and workshop is currently operated as a museum, housing the most significant existing collection of Willard timepieces, and a reconstruction of what Simon's original workshop might have looked like.
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