We took a little IA tour over the last weekend. We visited the curmudgeonette's college roommate, the curmudgeon's Marine Corps buddy and his ministry partner and took in Zion Davenport's 150th anniversary. A rich trip with a significant serendipity.
The serendipity happened because the roommate, who lives in Decorah, keeps local tourist information in her guest bedroom. We had a day to travel from Decorah to Iowa City, approximately 135 mile trip. In that tourist information was an article about Spillville, IA. which is only a few miles from Decorah.
I'd known for years that Antonin Dvorak spent a summer in Spillville and had written some of his music there. It was also common knowledge that there were some clocks in Spillville. So, with a little time on our hands, we took a very slight detour to see the museum. But I wasn't prepared for what we found.
The Bily (pronounced Beely) brothers, Joseph and Frank, sons of Czech immigrants indeed carved clocks. The first floor of the museum is filled with their clocks. Upstairs is the Dvorak displays in the building in which the Dvoraks lived the summer of 1893.
But those clocks, how can one describe the carving and mechanisms? Stupendous? Significant enough that Henry Ford offered a million dollars for one of them in 1928! And the brothers wouldn't sell it. They planned to give them to their sister but when she died prematurely they were set to burn them. A neighbor intervened and they were placed in the museum in Spillville on the condition that they never leave town. The Smithsonian Museum would love to have them but they cannot be moved.
Oh, yes, the brothers never traveled more than 35 miles from home.
1 comment:
http://www.etsy.com/blog/en/2010/carving-out-time-with-the-bily-brothers/
Very interesting. Ill take two of those clocks please.
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