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Marking Time
by Wally Kroeker
Of all the goods produced by Mennonite businesses in Russia, only the clock endures as an economic artifact of its era.
WINNIPEG, Man. -- They started coming in 1874, from the steppes of Russia to the central plains of the United States and Canada. By the time the tide of immigration subsided in the 1920s, some 40,000 Mennonites had crossed the Atlantic.
Hundreds lugged a particularly precious cargo -- a wall clock with bulky pendulum and heavy brass weights. Many were secured in wooden hope chests or wicker baskets. Some were swaddled in blankets on laps, never out of sight as they moved from Russian wagons to seagoing vessels, pitching and yawing across the stormy Atlantic, to riverboats and trains that would slice through the frontier to sodbuster homesteads on the plains of Kansas or Manitoba.
Of all the output generated by Mennonite business activity in Russia, the clock stands out as an economic artifact, marking much more than the strides of time.
Who were the craftsmen who put a clock in every home? There were names like Lepp, Hamm, Mandtler and Hildebrand. But the one that started it all and endured the longest was Kroeger. Mention that name to Mennonite history buffs and eyes light up. “Ahh, the clockmaker.”
Today, decades after the Kroeger company closed its doors, Russian Mennonite clocks are prized as heirlooms and sought after by collectors.
Locate one in a Mennonite museum and you'll be struck by its primitive simplicity -- a large metal wall clock with long brass pendulum and driven by brass weights on a string. No frills; no fancy cabinet or glass case. Just a well-crafted clock for simple Mennonite farmsteads of the 18th and 19th centuries. Plenty good for folk who measured life in seasons rather than hours.
From his home in a tree-lined Winnipeg neighborhood, Arthur Kroeger holds forth about horology, clock repair, Mennonite identity and a family business of generations past. Spry, lucid and good-humored, he is well into retirement. He is the grandson of the last Kroeger clockmaker in Russia, and the last one with a passion for clocks. His hobby these days is writing it all down for future generations.
In 1803 Kroeger's ancestor, the master clockmaker Johann Krueger, emigrated from Prussia to the Chortitza Colony in Russia where he changed his name to Kroeger, perhaps to differentiate himself from other branches of the clan. The Mennonites had begun settling in that area of Russia in 1789. By the time he arrived the region was well established, with sufficient economic rigor to support a clock business.
Along with his skill, Kroeger brought his tools and raw material to resume his trade. He would in time face competition from other Mennonite clockmakers. But he and his descendants would dominate.
“Clockmaking was a good business at that time,” says Arthur Kroeger. “The surrounding farm communities prospered. Other Mennonite colonies had been established, and the Kroegers supplied them all with clocks.”
The clocks had a reputation for being well-made and inexpensive. But that doesn’t mean they were cheap, says Kroeger.
He digs out a Russian advertisement from 1905. A basic model is listed at 15 rubles.
“Remember,” he cautions, “that the average worker earned only a ruble a day, so a clock cost two weeks salary.”
As people became more affluent they’d trade in their one-handed clock for a new model with two hands and a bell train that clanged on the hour. These could cost up to 50 rubles.
Eventually the market became saturated, and modernity set in. By the 1900s business began to dwindle. Other clockmakers re-invented themselves, using their mechanical skills to produce threshing machines, horse rakes and reapers.
David Kroeger, Arthur Kroeger's grandfather, kept producing clocks, though he would eventually give it up and turn to making two-cycle engines for agriculture. Another relative, also named Johann Kroeger, repaired clocks until 1938, but no new clocks were made after 1930. ‘Nearly 200 years of clockmaking by the Krueger/Kroeger family in Poland, Prussia and the Ukraine came to an end,” says Kroeger.
Arthur Kroeger, himself a native of Russia, emigrated to Canada via Germany in 1949. A teacher initially, he got work in a metal shop when he came to Winnipeg and later moved into drafting and engineering. He spent 37 years working as a technician, first for iron companies and then for Manitoba Hydro.
In Canada he met the Mennonite industrialist J.J. Klassen who had worked for Kroeger's grandfather in Russia.
“He knew there were quite a few Kroeger clocks in Canada, and told me I should get involved with clocks, because people would be coming to me for repairs and restoration. He was right.”
One day when a relative brought him a clock, Kroeger took it apart and cleaned it, and that became his first restoration job.
While he claims to have no entrepreneurial instincts (“too insecure”), he did have a knack for the mechanical side.
“I gradually got into it. I started to subscribe to the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors Bulletin. They had a lot of articles and pointers about how to fix clocks. I bought books and got myself some machinery, including a metal lathe.”
He also began restoring the decorative faceplates, the only concession to flair on the Russian Mennonite clocks. Some of the first models were adorned with biblical scenes, or colorful tulips depicting Anabaptism’s Dutch background. Later the Kroegers would use roses to represent their village of Rosenthal -- the valley of roses.
Part of the simplicity of the clocks was that their faceplates were exposed, not encased in wood and glass. “That made them vulnerable to getting dirty, especially on the farms,’ says Kroeger.
In many immigrant homes, well-meaning homemakers would diligently clean their clocks with soap and detergent, not the greatest thing for the paint, which was homemade to begin with. “And being over a hundred years old, the paint would crack off, especially here on the prairies where we have a very dry climate,” he says.
Restorations have kept Kroeger busy. Over the years he has done about 80 of them. “I’ve got clocks around the clock,” he says.
For Kroeger, clocks are not only a rewarding hobby but also a treasured link with his past. As with many Russian Mennonites, it is a past filled with tragedy. The Kroeger family suffered greatly under the Bolsheviks. Kroeger’s grandfather David, the last Kroeger to make a living at clocks, was beaten to death by anarchists.
Kroeger’s father worked with clocks but didn’t make a profession of it. He learned the trade as a child. When the Kroeger children came home from school they’d work in the shop for an hour or two, making clock parts before they could go out and play. “It was kind of a compulsory apprenticeship,” Kroeger says.
In 1990 a clock came into Kroeger’s Winnipeg shop for repair. When he examined the mechanism he made a startling discovery. Inside were scratched the initials of his father, who would have been 16 when he worked on this particular clock. He died in a Soviet concentration camp in 1942.
What helped spell the end of the Kroeger clock dynasty was the product’s simple sturdiness.
“They made their clocks too good,” says Kroeger of his forebears. “The market became saturated, and there was no obsolescence.”
The new Soviet era, meanwhile, had no room for private enterprise, and electrification didn’t help. “The electric clock finished off the mechanical clock business,” says Kroeger.
The Kroegers might have prolonged the life of their company by adapting to the times and diversifying into different models with fancy cases. But they were Mennonites who still valued simplicity.
“They had a fear of becoming too worldly,” he says.
Kroeger’s research suggests that Mennonite clockmakers in Russia manufactured some 10,000 to 12,000 clocks in a hundred-year period. About 80 percent of them were made by Kroegers.
How many still exist? Kroeger estimates there are still a couple of hundred clocks in homes in Canada, U.S. and Central and South America. More may still exist in parts of the former Soviet Union.
Ask him what they’re worth today and he smiles mischievously. He doesn’t like to speculate. Collectors don’t want him to disrupt the market. Besides, much of a clock’s value is in the eye of the beholder.
“Let’s just say some of them in top condition have fetched a good price,” he says.
With the possible exception of the family hope chest, the clock was the leading “Mennonite export” from Russia. For Mennonite immigrants enduring poverty and hardship in their new land, the clock gave a sense of connectedness with their past. It reminded them of a time when they were still prosperous.
Kroeger tells the story of an elderly woman in Germany. When still in Russia her family had been forced to move a lot, but they were always able to take their clock with them. Then the clock had fallen silent and needed repair. Now the woman was old and blind, and hoped someone would come to fix her clock. Before she died she wanted to hear it one more time. Not many businesses today can boast a product with such mystique.
“You look at it every day, you have to wind it every day, it becomes part of the family,” says Kroeger.
“When the father would ceremoniously get up to wind the clock it was a sure sign for visitors to leave. The routine of winding the clock at the same time every day created a bond with a machine that was always in motion.”
For new immigrants on the plains, the reassuring tick-tock was like a mechanical heartbeat. “I am at home,” it seemed to say.
The old pendulum clock on Kroeger’s wall reaches the top of the hour and interrupts him with a sharp, metallic bong. Kroeger pauses to listen as the sequence plays out. His grandfather would have heard the same bong, from the same clock, when he made it a hundred years ago.
“It’s a good sound,"”says Kroeger, as he gazes wistfully into the distance, pondering the incremental passage of time.
SIDEBARS1) A clockmaking dynasty
The skill of clockmaking grew out of blacksmithing. Clockmakers, who had to know mathematics, metallurgy and precision engineering, were the master mechanics of their time.
Mennonite clockmaking dates back almost to the beginning of the Anabaptist movement. Hutterites made clocks for church towers as early as 1572. By the 1700s a “dynasty” of Mennonite clockmakers had grown up in southwest Germany. These skills were dispersed as the Mennonites migrated -- some to the eastern U.S. and others to the new colonies in Russia.
The long pendulum wall clock was invented in the Netherlands by the famous Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens in 1656. All Mennonite clockmakers in Russia made this type of clock.
When Johann Kroeger migrated to the Chortitza colony in the early 1800s, he became the first Mennonite clockmaker in Russia. The Kroegers made clocks for four generations thereafter. Others, like Lepp, Hamm and Hildebrand, came later, and lasted only one generation.
For a time Mennonite clockmaking in the Danzig area had been an underground industry. Guilds of major trades did not permit newcomers to work, especially if they were despised Anabaptists (as Mennonites were also known). Only guild members were allowed to mark their products with their names. When the Kroeger clockmakers moved to Russia they continued the tradition of not marking their clocks, though there were some exceptions.
“If a clock has no markings at all it most likely will be a Kroeger,” says Arthur Kroeger.
(2)
Makhno’s boots
Marauding anarchists, led by the infamous Nestor Makhno, destroyed many Kroeger clocks. When they plundered Mennonite villages the clock became a favorite target because they mistook its burnished metal for gold. They’d seize a clock, gallop out of the village and later cast it aside after ripping out the weights and chains.
One clock is known as the Nestor Makhno clock. The brutal bandit was known to take over a village and make himself at home in the most prosperous house. From there he would lecture village leaders on how life would now proceed under the revolution. On one occasion a Kroeger clock bonged while Makhno was in mid-speech. The interruption startled him and in fury he tore the clock from the wall and trampled on it.
When he left, the family collected the pieces. Years later Arthur Kroeger was called upon to create a duplicate faceplate. The damaged original was donated to the Mennonite Heritage Center in Winnipeg, where it still bears the dents of Nestor Makhno’s boots.
Mennonite Historical Bulletin, July 1999