Jerome was born on June 10, 1793, in Canaan, Connecticut, the son of Lyman and Sallie (Noble) Jerome. His father was a blacksmith and wrought-iron maker, in very poor circumstances, and Jerome's early life was an extremely hard one. When he was eleven years old his father died, and because his mother was unable to support him he was compelled to leave home and work for the neighboring farmers.
After obtaining some education in the district school during three winters, at the age of nine Jerome was taken into his father's shop and taught to make nails.
After four years of working for farmers, Jerome went to live with a house carpenter in Plymouth, Connecticut, to learn that trade, and while so engaged he obtained permission to work for himself during the dull winter months, making dials for grandfather clocks. He soon became skilled in this work but his progress was interrupted by the War of 1812, in which he served with a company of Plymouth militiamen on guard duty at New London and New Haven. Shortly after peace was declared he married and with his bride moved to Farmington, Connecticut, where for about a year and a half he engaged in his trade of carpentry.
In the winter of 1816 Jerome obtained employment with Eli Terry, who was making his patent shelf clocks in his factory at Plymouth, and the following spring he bought some clock parts, mahogany, and veneers, and in a small shop started a clock-making business of his own. For five years he led a rather hand-to-mouth existence, peddling his clocks from farmhouse to farmhouse, and in 1822 he moved to Bristol, Connecticut, where he built a small shop for making clock cases only. He had considerable difficulty disposing of these and was without the necessary means to purchase movements to place in them, but in the fall of 1824 he succeeded in forming a clock company with his brother Noble, and Elijah Darrow. About six months later he devised the so-called "bronze looking-glass clock, " which became extremely popular and resulted in starting him on the road to financial success. Business increased rapidly from 1827 to 1837, during which time more clocks were made by Jerome's company than by any of its competitors.
Because of the opposition of the South to Yankee clocks, he started a clock assembling plant in Richmond, Virginia, in 1835, to which he shipped cases and clock movements made at his factory in Bristol. In 1836 he established a similar plant in Hamburg, South Carolina. The breakdown of all business in the great panic of 1837 materially affected his business, but this shrinkage was somewhat offset by his timely invention of a one-day brass clock movement, which could be made and sold more cheaply than the one-day wood clock. He began its manufacture in 1838 and by 1841 the company had made clear profits of $35, 000. In 1842 he purchased a defunct carriage factory in New Haven, Connecticut, and fitted it up for making clock cases, retaining at Bristol his plant for the manufacture of movements. Three years later, however, after a fire had partially destroyed his Bristol factory, he carried on the entire business in New Haven. During the succeeding five years it grew to large proportions. The clocks were so good and so much in demand that many small manufacturers used Jerome's clock labels for their own poor clocks, and to protect himself he was drawn into a number of lawsuits.
In 1850 he was induced to form a joint stock company with the Benedict & Burnham Company of Waterbury, and the new firm was called the Jerome Manufacturing Company. This change proved to be the beginning of Jerome's downfall. The business was very profitable for a year or two but misplaced confidences brought about the complete failure of the company in 1855 and left Jerome a veritable pauper. To the entrance of P. T. Barnum into the concern Jerome attributed this disaster. At the age of sixty-two he was compelled to start all over again at the bench. He moved to Waterbury and worked one year for the Benedict & Burnham Company. He was then induced by an unscrupulous individual to take up clock making in another Connecticut town, but two years later he returned to New Haven and spent the remaining ten years of his life in obscurity, dying in very straitened circumstances. In 1860 he published a History of the American Clock Business for the Past Sixty Years and a Life of Chauncey Jerome Written by Himself.
Jerome died on April 20, 1868, in New Haven, Connecticut.
Jerome was a clock maker whose products enjoyed widespread popularity in the mid-19th century. By the early 1850's, the Jerome Manufacturing Company, with factories in Derby, Connecticut and New Haven, Connecticut, had become one of the largest clockmaking operations in the United States. Beginning in 1856, a series of unfortunate business arrangements and other miscarriages ruined him financially, and he struggled in his later years.
Shortly after the War of 1812 ended, Jerome married, in February 1815, Salome Smith, daughter of Captain Theophilus Smith of Plymouth, and with his bride moved to Farmington, Connecticut, where for about a year and a half he engaged in his trade of carpentry. He was survived by three children.
