A joint stock company called the E. N. Welch Manufacturing Company was established on July 6, 1864, to take over the operations of an older, privately owned clock manufacturer. Welch, N. Since assuming control of J.’s failing company, Elisha N. Welch (1809–1887) had been producing clocks at a factory on East Main Street in Forestville, Connecticut. About 1856, C. Brown.
In 1869, a new movement shop was constructed, expanding the company’s existing two factories. A secondary company called Welch, Spring & Company was established between 1868 and 1884 to make a more costly range of clocks. More information about this company will be covered elsewhere. The Welch Company was renowned for its elegant rosewood cases, but in 1885, when furniture design trends changed, the surviving Company started to manufacture new models with solid walnut cases and phased out some of the earlier rosewood veneered cases.
Elisha Welch was smitten with Adelina Patti, a beautiful (but very liberal-thinking) Spanish singer of the day. She inspired him to name his greatest quality movement, the “Patti” movement, after her. Seriou’s collectors highly prize clocks with this mechanism.
Elisha Welch died in 1887, and the company quickly started to go downhill. To acquire money, it sold part of its assets and issued new shares. For the year 1893, a new line of clocks that looked to be of much lower quality than its reduced line was released. The plant was shut down in May of that year, and a receiver was appointed who spent over two years liquidating goods and paying off the company’s obligations. It took the company another year to start up again.
The majority of the Welch industrial complex was burned to ashes in 1899 as a result of two fires, one in March and the other in December. By April 1900, the newly constructed and occupied brick factory was preventing them from being able to pay their debts. As they worked to acquire previous owners, members of the affluent Sessions family finally gained control of the company in 1902 and changed the name to the Sessions Clock Company on January 9, 1903.
The period from 1903 through 1933 might be viewed as the Sessions Clock Company’s “Golden Age.” They made 52 distinct versions of mechanical clocks during this time. Numerous of those are sought-after treasures. The Sessions Clock Company and E.N. Welch are both printed on the first versions of the clocks. When Sessions began producing higher-quality clocks in 1920 and stopped producing the earlier Welch versions, the practice gradually came to an end.
The switch from mechanical, spring-driven clocks to electric clocks was successfully negotiated by The Sessions Clock Company. In 1936, they stopped producing mechanical clocks and started selling exclusively electric timepieces.
The business stopped creating clocks during World Military 2 and instead produced war supplies from 1943 until the conflict was over in 1945.
The name changes from The Sessions Clock Company to The Sessions Company in 1956 did not stop the company’s declining revenues, which resulted in a loss of more than a million dollars in 1958. In 1958, Consolidated Electronics Industries Corporation purchased the business. Nine weeks later, a strike, and another sale followed, this time to United Metal Goods Company. When United Metal Goods closed the Forestville facility after 137 years of operation, it marked the end of an era.
In 1969, what was remained was sold to Norelco. They were just intending to produce electric control devices at that point. The remaining buildings were sold after the firm went into insolvency in 1970 due to poor sales.