Asa Collier’s Clock and Watch Repair Business, 1840s-1880s

From the 1840s until the mid-1880s, the Anderson Market building was occupied by Asa Collier’s clock and watch repair business, which also included jewelry, eyeglasses, cutlery, kerosene lamps and other merchandise. Collier’s account books, housed in the Concord Free Public Library Special Collections, show that he began doing business in Westborough, where he married his first wife, Sarah, before establishing himself in Concord. He bought the Haynes watch, clock, and jewelry business, and carried on his trade on the Mill Dam for about forty years. With his second wife, Mary Ann, he lived in the Renselaer Bacon house on the south side of Main Street.

In John Shepard Keyes’s Houses in Concord in 1885, Adams Tolman (who annotated Keyes’s work) relates the following anecdote about Collier: A Concord gentleman, not feeling that any local jeweler was skilled enough to perform work on his valuable watch, would take his fine timepiece only to Palmer, Batchelder & Co. in Boston. But upon walking one day into Collier’s shop, he found his watch hanging in the regulating case. It turned out that Collier’s skills were such that the Boston firm often sent watches to him for maintenance and repairs, to the surprise of the Concord gentleman who had assumed that Collier, who was not particularly well-spoken and who had a habit of incorrectly quoting Shakespeare, was a simple, small town artisan and not a highly-skilled craftsman, respected for the quality of his work.