Daniel Burnar

Background

Burnap was born in Coventry Township, Connecticut, on November 1, 1759, in what is now Andover.

Education

He learned clockmaking as an apprentice to Thomas Harland at Norwich, Connecticut.

Career

About 1780 he settled in East Windsor, Connecticut, and there started his own clockmaking business. He specialized in eight-day brass movements in tall cases, though he may have made a few wooden movements after the style of the Cheneys. Eli Terry learned from Burnap many of the methods he later put to good use in clockmaking. Burnap may well have been the first to use interchangeable parts and mass production, since from his records it appears that he built more than one clock at the same time. However, Harland also may have followed this practice. Sometime after 1800 Burnap moved back to Coventry and by 1805 built a house in which he lived for the rest of his life. As justice of the peace, he held courts on the ground floor. In his shop he continued to make clocks and also brass hardware, surveyors' instruments, and silver spoons and buckles. Few of his clocks are dated after 1815, at which time he turned his shop over to an apprentice and, from his attic, carried on the less taxing work of engraving and watch repair. He died in Coventry on September 26, 1838.

Achievements

• His clocks, still extant in fair numbers, are among the most interesting American examples of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.