Greetings, Comet Nation!
Today’s Throwback Thursday post isn’t about sports, but about a unique piece of ‘time’-less history and gives a special story all of its own.
It is something that maybe it caught your eye, maybe you never knew it existed, but it has been there quite a while, hiding in plain sight, right in Old Main.
Roughly for almost a century, I’m guessing!
The item is a “Lathem Watchman Station” box, which houses a key inside it on a chain.
The box can be found at the very top of 3rd floor in Old Main, on the wall by the west end’s stairway. Check it out next time you’re up on 3rd floor of Old Main!
What the heck is a Lathem’s Watchman Station, anyway?
Well, Watchmen of lore, basically night time security guards, sometimes would sleep on the job while everyone else was typically sleeping. This led to a problem of watchmen not doing their jobs in the evenings like they should have.
The Watchman Stations would require the nightly Watchmen to ‘punch in’ with a big time clock they would lug around, at certain stations throughout the evening. Simply turn the key into the time clock, and that would record the time and place according to the key at each station.
This is an example of such a clock, roughly the size of a canteen.
In a time before time clocks, this was the solution used for watchmen’s records of whether or not they were making their rounds.
The Lathem Company is still in business, having started in 1919, so I’m assuming this Watchman Station was in place sometime around then or in the 1920’s.
From what I can find, these Watchmen time clock systems were short-lived, as technology made it easier to track the rounds with punch clocks instead. Estimated history tells us that they become obsolete perhaps by 1940.
Stories on the web about night-time Watchmen tell a person that you could hear the night Watchman coming and going, due to the noise this clock would make as it was lugged around.
It is pretty neat that this little piece of history is still a part of Old Main’s stories that it continues to tell.
Check it out next time you are up on the 3rd floor of Old Main!
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