On May 3, 1853, the Seth Thomas Clock Company was established as a joint stock corporation to take over the founder’s previous clock manufacturing business. Since 1814, Seth Thomas (1785–1859) has been producing clocks there.
After Thomas died in 1859, his son Aaron took over as president and started to expand a conservative range of goods. The company introduced three more models to its lineup in 1862 after buying the patent rights from Wait T. Huntington and Harvey Platts of Ithaca, New York. Only three patent dates—September 19, 1854, November 17, 1857, and January 31, 1860—are listed on the dials of the oldest clocks.
The majority of their calendar clocks produced up to 1875 or 1876 still have the fourth and final patent, dated March 1, 1862. An improved mechanism was given a patent on February 15, 1876, by Randall T. Andrews, Jr., a Thomas related and factory worker. This was manufactured and used on all subsequent perpetual calendar clocks until the last model was discontinued in 1917.
Even by its rivals, the Seth Thomas Clock Company was the “Tiffany’s” of Connecticut clock manufacturing and enjoyed great prosperity far into the 20th century. They supported a New York sales outlet known as the American Clock Company at that time by operating a subsidiary company called Seth Thomas’ Sons & Company that produced a higher-grade 15-day mantel clock movement between 1865 and 1879. After 1872, they also rose to prominence as a prominent producer of tower and street clocks, and between 1915, they produced jeweled watches.
The company was quickly freed from family ownership after becoming a subsidiary of General Time Instruments Corporation on January 1, 1931. The company’s slow deterioration over the following 50 years ended in its relocation from Connecticut to Norcross, Georgia, in 1975. The business was reportedly all but disbanded in 1988, and in 2003 the firm’s internal collection was sold to individual collector