Article October 4, 1900 Issue

Some Washington Clocks

Chicago Record

There are six hundred clocks in the Treasury Department and a man named Fleming is paid forty-five dollars a month for winding them and keeping them in repair. This duty is let annually to the lowest bidder and the cost has been reduced from seventy-five dollars to forty-five a month by rivalry between Mr. Fleming and another clockmaker who secured the job for two or three years through political influence during the last Cleveland administration.

Mr. Fleming had looked after the clocks in the Treasury at a salary of seventy-five dollars a month as long as anybody could remember, until he considered that privilege a vested right, and when it was taken away from him by Secretary Carlisle he was very uneasy and finally underbid his rival and offered to do it for sixty dollars a month. The contract was given him and the next year the other man underbid him and got the job for fifty dollars a month. Next time Fleming came in with an offer of forty-five dollars a month, which was really lower than anybody could afford to make, because is requires nearly all his time to perform the duties, particularly as many of the clocks are getting old and constantly need repairs. In the other departments the messengers of the different bureaus look after the clocks, except the large ones that are connected by wire with the Naval Observatory and accurately mark the sun time.

The clocks at the White House are looked after by one of the local jewelry merchants, who sends a man every week to wind them and see that they are in order. It is a curious fact that only one of the twenty-five or thirty clocks in the White House is of American manufacture, and that is a big gilt affair which stands on the mantel in the Green Room and was purchased while James Monroe was President.

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