Pequegnat Clocks

The Arthur Pequegnat Clock Company of Berlin, Ontario — the town renamed Kitchener in 1916 — was Canada's great home-grown clockmaker. Arthur Pequegnat, born into a Swiss watchmaking family that emigrated in 1874, built his first clock catalogue in 1904 and mailed it to jewellers across the young Dominion.

His movements were made in his own factory; the cases — most often heart wood of quarter-sawn white oak with beautiful ray flecks, in the spirit of the Arts and Crafts movement — came first from local furniture factories and, from the mid-1920s, from his own case works in Breslau. School boards and railway companies bought his regulators; Canadian families bought his mantel clocks, each model named for a Canadian city — his trademark marketing idea.

Six catalogues are known, from 1904 to No. 6 in 1928. Roughly sixty-five shelf models, sixteen wall models and seven hall — grandfather — models were catalogued. Arthur died in 1927; his family carried the company until 1941, when wartime brass shortages forced its closure. The factory was demolished in 1964 and the production records with it, which is why individual catalogue details for some models are scarce to this day.

This catalogue gathers every documented model — each with its photograph, its specification, and its history, as far as the surviving record allows.