← All brands

Hampden Watch Company

United States · Founded 1877 · No longer in production

Traces to the Mozart Watch Company (Providence, RI, founded 1864 per railswest.com or 1866 per Wikipedia - sources disagree on the exact year), reorganized in October 1867 as the New York Watch Company and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. After a factory fire and financial trouble in the mid-1870s, the firm reorganized again in January 1877 as the Hampden Watch Company under first president Homer Foote; that 1877 relaunch is the founding year used here, matching this brief's framing. Hampden secured the U.S. trademark on the word 'Railway' for a watch in July 1900. In 1886 John C. Dueber (founder of the Dueber Watch Case Co., Cincinnati) bought a controlling interest; he purchased Hampden outright in 1888 and relocated both firms to a shared plant in Canton, Ohio (move completed 1888-1889). The two businesses formally merged into one corporate entity in 1923. Dueber sold the company to Walter Vrettman in 1925; falling sales led to receivership in 1927. In 1930 the Soviet trading agency Amtorg Trading Corporation purchased the company's remaining machinery, tooling, and designs - documented as 28 boxcars of equipment shipped to Moscow along with 21 former Dueber-Hampden employees who trained Soviet workers, founding the USSR's First State Watch Factory (predecessor of Poljot/1st Moscow Watch Factory). This Soviet-acquisition story checked out as real and well-corroborated (Wikipedia's Hampden Watch Company and Dueber-Hampden Watch Company articles, both citing James W. Gibbs's book 'From Springfield to Moscow: The Complete Dueber-Hampden Story'; barrygoldberg.net independently states the same 1930 Russian sale) - it is not a collector myth. A separate, unrelated present-day 'Hampden' watch brand (est. 1922 Chicago as Clinton Watch Co.; acquired the Hampden name in 1958 by the Wein family, later also acquiring Benrus) is NOT the historic manufacturer catalogued here.