Clockmaker and silversmith’s account book

This ledger was kept by Robinson Perkins, a New Hampshire clockmaker and silversmith, between 1801 and 1831. Newspapers and other printed clippings were pasted to many pages in the volume in the third quarter of the nineteenth century.

This double-entry ledger contains Perkins’s accounts with various customers, debtors, and creditors, most of whom lived near Jaffrey or Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire. He kept an alphabetical index of account holders at the back of the ledger. Much of Perkins’s work consisted of making and repairing clocks, watches, and silver goods. In addition to watch glasses and silver spoons, it appears that Perkins sold a wide variety of metalwork and ceramics, including pudding pans, chamber pots, porringers, and pails. Perkins also earned cash and credit by painting signs, taking legal depositions, and lending out his chaise and sleigh. He occasionally sold livestock, dyestuffs, and textiles. Account holders used a mixture of cash, goods, and services to pay Perkins. Common payments included butter, brass, clock plates, wood, shoes, spinning and weaving. Several men made wooden cases for Robinson’s clocks, including Ebenezer Lincoln and Thomas Tarbell.

A large portion of Perkins’s customers were military officers, and occasionally commissioned him to produce cartridge boxes and breast plates and to repair pistols. In his account with Simon Warren, Perkins noted that on June 29, 1813, he had produced “a clock with a second hand, day of the month, day of the week, and moon’s age” costing seventeen dollars, which was delivered to Captain Oliver Warren.

There is also a loose leaf of paper that has been laid into the volume entitled “an account of what I expended in repairing the house & shop,” in which Perkins enumerated expenses incurred between June 25 and November 7, 1825. These costs included purchases of clapboards, shingles, nails, boards, and linseed oil.

Numerous pages in the volume have been torn out. Newspaper clippings and other printed materials were pasted onto many other pages, probably in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Most of these clippings appear to be poems and short works of fiction, perhaps taken from literary magazines and other periodicals. There is also an excerpt from an Independence Day speech by Henry Ward Beecher.

This volume is bound in brown leather over boards with tooled borders around the front and back covers. There are also six tooled bands on the volume’s spine. The volume contains 334 pages of unlined laid paper with handwritten notations in black ink. The first page reads “Robinson Perkins’s Accompt Book No. 2 Jaffrey May ye 12th 1801.” The watermark “L. BEMIS” is visible on some pages in the volume. A watermark of a plow is visible on other pages.