Willard House and Clock Museum

History

The Willard House and Clock Museum is a museum located in North Grafton, Massachusetts, United States. Located at 11 Willard Street, it is located at the former farm homestead of the Willard brothers (Benjamin, Simon, Ephraim, and Aaron). The brothers 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 and is on the National Register of Historic Places. It stands in a rural setting, in the middle of a field that was part of the Willard farm back in the 18th century.

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.

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