Constituted at Seattle, 14 March 1911
The house and its makers
Eleven makers of different trades agreed, one winter evening in 1911, to share a workshop, a hallmark and a rule. The workshop has grown. The hallmark and the rule have not changed.
The House on Aske Place
The House was built in 1909 for a timber merchant who did not live to move into it. The Association bought it in the autumn of 1911 with a loan from a Seattle bank that Tobias Rosen repaid, by his own account, out of the proceeds of mending other people’s clocks.
The street was a lane without a name until 1931, when the city named it after Euphemia Aske, the maker of glass eyes among the founders, who had lived at the House for twenty years and was known to every child in the neighborhood as the lady who could make a doll look back at you.
The eleven
The Association was constituted at a meeting in the back room of Tobias Rosen’s shop on the evening of 14 March 1911. Eleven makers signed the Articles that night. Between them they could make almost anything that moved, breathed, sang or looked back, and none of them could make all of it alone.
| Maker | Trade | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Tobias Rosen | clockmaker and organ builder | First President, 1911–1932 |
| Euphemia Aske | maker of glass eyes for museums | Aske Place was named for her in 1931 |
| Anselm Kroll | organ voicer | Made the Lark Lantern |
| Ida Weller | enameler | Taught enamel at the House until 1951 |
| Joseph Lindqvist | cabinetmaker | Made the Copyist’s desk |
| Harald Moen | watchmaker | Cut the first cam stack |
| Cora Bellweather | wigmaker and hair-worker | The house’s hair is still set to her method |
| Matthias Oberle | bellows maker | Every breathing piece since uses his bellows |
| Lena Strand | jeweler | Designed the house mark |
| Wendell Pike | lens grinder | Ground the first eye lenses |
| Rosalind Hayes | natural history preparator | Made the Sleeping Hound |
They elected Tobias Rosen President, because the meeting was in his shop and because, in the words of the minutes, “he had the most clocks.” The house has carried his name since.
Four rooms
The Atelier occupies the whole of the top floor and the old stable block behind it: a hundred and four benches, a feather room kept at a constant humidity, a furnace for the ocularist and a long table where every piece is assembled the second time. The Atelier and its trades
The Archive fills the basement. It holds the Register of Provenance in forty-three bound volumes, the makers’ notebooks since 1911, the plan chests of drawings and a copy of every letter the house has sent.
The Salon is the long room on the ground floor where keepers are received and the Owl, a replica, is kept in its case. The entrance hall beside it holds the original Articles under glass and the Copyist, which writes there at noon on the first Monday of each month.
The Penfield Room is a small paneled room off the Salon, in which the first Penfield instrument was tuned in 1979. Heritage instruments are still tuned there. The Mk IV was tuned at the Penfield Works in Everett, in nine rooms built as copies of it.
Still an association
The house is a family firm, and it is an association, and it has never seen any difficulty in being both. Its members are not shareholders but makers: forty-one Associates, elected for life by the Associates already living, who between them elect a President every seventh March. The President has been a Rosen since 1911.
What the Association is, and how it is governed · The Articles · Chronology · Leadership