87.              $500

Chauncey Jerome four-day oversized steeple,ca. 1845.  A 22.5-inch steeple with good mahogany veneer and a clean finish.  Both glasses are period and likely original; the tablet is well-preserved.  The dial is new and was painted by The Dial House; the hands are period/original.  The signed (Chauncey Jerome, New Haven, CT) movement has large brass springs and dust covers; it is running and striking on the wire gong. There is a good label behind plastic on the back wall.  Why a four-day movement?  I posed this question on the AAC Facebook page and resident expert Jim DuBois explained that this was an early attempt by Jerome to produce an 8-day, spring-driven small shelf clock.  To make the clock affordable brass springs were used (steel springs were too expensive), but the current 8-day brass springs were too wide to fit between the plates, so a narrower spring was used; this yielded only four days of power.  Four-day clocks never caught on, probably in part because you couldn’t set a weekly schedule to wind—winding day changed every week. Affordable steel springs soon made the issue moot, and very few 4-day steeples were manufactured; only a half-dozen or so of this model are known to exist today.  I can’t find a sale of a 4-day steeple on LiveAuctioneers or the Antique Clocks Identification and Price Guide, but that may be because they weren’t listed as such.  AAC sold one a year ago for only $175; afterwards several collectors told me how much they regretted missing that clock.  Don’t let that happen to you!  $500–$1000.

Thanks to Jim DuBois for helping me out!