MEMORANDUM

 

TO:
Stanley Weiss

FROM: 
Virginia Stuart-Howard

DATE:
  5 March 2014

RE:     Description and story of the Rathbun Clock

 

HEPPLEWHITE
INLAID MAHOGANY TALL CASE CLOCK

William
Stanton, Providence, ‘Rhode Island c. 1814-1816

With
a scroll cresting with three brass ball finials above a molded hood above a
white painted dial with rocking ship tympanum and fan spandrels
centering an eight day time-and strike movement the waisted
case outlined with pattern stringing and with a cockbeaded door; the inlaid base outlined with pattern
stringing and continuing to a valanced skirt and high French feet. 93 inches high

 

Note:
William Stanton (1794-1878) is recorded
as working in Providence in the years

1814 to 1816

Description by Appraiser Ronald De Silva 18 January 2002

There is a Stanton clock in the Rhode Island School of Design
Museum.

 

 

PROVENANCE

 

The
clock was the property of the Rathbun family of Wickford, Rhode Island. The
clock came to my father Rodman Gardiner Rathbun from his first cousin Emily
Chase Ellis who inherited it.  Her
mother, ………… was the sister of Thomas A.
Rathbun, she married ……….. Chase. Emily was an only
child, she married …………. Ellis who died quite
young and they did not have children. 
So, Emily was widowed early.  Emily was with us for
Thanksgiving in the late 20’s and early ’30’s when my grandfather Thomas A. Rathbun lived with us from
1926 after his wife died.  Emily was of
an earlier generation and had not changed and had no reason to; I remember her
dressed in brown silk with high lace collars and high button shoes.  After my grandfather died ( 1932?) Emily no
longer came for any Holiday dinners and maintained only a remote relationship
with my father, her cousin.  I learned years
later that Emily withdrew from family association due to a change in her
lifestyle that would have been unacceptable. She owned a house in Providence
and had a lover who moved from New York to live with her. My recollection is
that he had a wife in an institution which precluded marriage, and two adults
living together was not acceptable in that era. His name was John and he was a
retired attorney or in investments. My father met him and said he was a very
nice man. I think he died around 1940 and Emily was again alone and left to
live frugally. She was independent but my father kept in touch. I think in about 1947 Emily
needed money and contacted my father to help her sell the clock, and my father
bought the clock. Emily was increasingly frail with failing eyesight and
sometime thereafter, she rented the lower floor of her house to a woman who
would take care of her. As she became nearly blind, the woman took advantage of
her and stole most of Emily’s antiques and a great amount of Canton china and probably
silver. This was discovered when Emily died in 1956. It is a
sad story tangential to the Rathbun/ Stanton clock. The Stanton clock was
always in the dining room of Two Cushing Street and it was wound every Sunday
morning with the other tall Rathbun clock in the hall, both wound by my father,
and then by my mother and lastly by sister Edith.

 

Note:
The names in para. 1 can
be checked in the Rathbun plot in Elm Grove Cemetery in
Allenton, adjacent to Wickford.  Thomas
R. Rathbun, Sr. at one time owned the house known as Smith’s Castle in
Wickford, then known as Cocumcussoc Farm. My grandfather, Thomas R. Rathbun,
remembered helping to build a stone wall (pointed out to me years ago), on the south side of the RI State
Police Barracks on Rte: 1 a couple of hundred yards,
location was/is west of Cocumcussoc Farm near Devil’s Foot Rock on the west
side of Rte.1.

Referenced: Yale University Art Gallery, Rhode Island Furniture Archive #RIF5941

Height: 91 in.