Hampden 10K Gold Filled Wristwatch with Leather Strap, AS IS. Squircle body and face with moderate curvilinear perspective, the number 6 replaced by a square second hand timer. Marked on the back. 

We cannot guarantee the working condition of any timepiece.

Size: 1 1/4 x 9 in. 

The Dueber-Hampden Watch Company began as two separate companies in the final days of the Civil War. In 1864 John C. Dueber founded the Dueber Watch Case Company in Cincinnati, Ohio to manufacture cases for fine watches. The Mozart Watch Company was founded in 1866 by Donald J. Mozart in Providence, Rhode Island. The company failed within a year, and in 1867 he reorganized the firm as the New York Watch Company, with production facilities in Springfield, Massachusetts. Three years later the company’s factory burnt to the ground, and was finally rebuilt in 1877, doing business as the Hampden Watch Company. In 1886, Dueber, who had been making cases for Hampden, purchased a controlling interest in it. The next year an anti-trust law was passed and the watch case manufacturers formed a boycott against Dueber’s company, so in 1888 Dueber bought Hampden outright and moved both companies to a dual set of factory buildings in Canton, Ohio. By the end of their first year in Canton, the combined firms employed almost 10% of the city’s entire population. Hampden used the Dueber cases until the companies merged in 1923 to become Dueber-Hampden. In 1925 John Dueber sold the company to Walter Vrettman, but due to the decline in pocket watch sales after World War I the business closed in 1927. In 1930 the factory and all of the assets were sold to the Amtorg Trading Corporation, who moved the equipment, parts on hand, and works in progress to Soviet Russia. 28 boxcars of machinery left Canton, along with 21 employees who were paid to teach the Russian workers watchmaking. In 1931 the renamed First State Watch Factory produced their first pocket watches, which were presented at a ceremonial meeting in the Revolution Theater. In 1941, as the Nazi army closed in on Moscow, the factory was hurriedly evacuated to Zlatoust, where more than 300,000 Zlatoust Type-1 watches and clocks were made. By 1943 the Moscow factory was re-established and renamed the First Moscow Watch Factory. They continued the manufacture of pocket watches and stopwatches as the flagship brand of the USSR, including pieces for space missions and the first watch worn in space by Yuri Gagarin. In 1958 the Wein family, founders of the Clinton Watch Company in Chicago, acquired the rights to use the Hampden name, producing wristwatches and new time pieces from a factory they opened two years later in Neuchatel, Switzerland. Another factory opened in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands in 1970, and in the early 1980s Clinton acquired Benrus Watch Company, marketing pieces under multiple names from then on. In 1997, facing financial issues, Clinton sold off the Benrus brand and renamed itself Hampden Watch Company, doing business as such ever since. Meanwhile, in  Russia, the First Moscow Watch Factory and all the surviving original assets of the Dueber-Hampden Company was bought in the early 2000s by the businessman Sergeï Pugachev, becoming part of his new luxury group along with Hédiard and the channel Luxe TV. The physical remnants of the factory were then purchased by a group of former Poljot employees, forming the basis for a new company, Volmax. Volmax marketed watches under the Aviator, Buran, and Shturmanskie brands using movements produced by another Russian firm, MakTime. MakTime, the company utilizing old Poljot equipment to manufacture mechanical movements, went bankrupt in the 2010s, but Volmax continues to produce a small number of watches from the heart of Moscow to this day, still using designs and ideas brought to them from the workers of Ohio almost a century before. 

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