Background
Terry was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, 1772. He was the eldest of ten children of Samuel and Huldah (Burnham) Terry. He was a descendant of Samuel Terry who emigrated from England to Springfield, Massachussets, in 1650.
Terry was born at East Windsor, Connecticut, 1772. He was the eldest of ten children of Samuel and Huldah (Burnham) Terry. He was a descendant of Samuel Terry who emigrated from England to Springfield, Massachussets, in 1650.
Equipped with but a smattering of a common school education, at the age of fourteen he began his clockmaker's apprenticeship.
For the six years (1786 - 92) he worked for a number of clockmakers in his native state, among them Daniel Burnap of East Windsor and possibly Timothy Cheney of East Hartford. In 1793, a year after making his first clock (still in existence in 1923), he settled in Plymouth, Connecticut, and set himself up in the business of making and repairing clocks, engraving on metal, and selling spectacles. In his clockmaking he used the simple hand tools of the day and made but one or two hang-up clocks at a time, under orders. Having little difficulty in disposing of his wares, about 1800 he decided to increase his production by using water power to drive his tools, and about three years later he began, with two or three apprentices, to turn out ten to twenty clocks at a time. This enterprise, much ridiculed by Terry's neighbors and fellow clockmakers, was the first clock factory in America.
In 1807 he obtained a contract for making four thousand wood clocks at four dollars apiece, sold his original water power factory, bought a large mill with water power in another part of Plymouth, and with Seth Thomas and Silas Hoadley established the firm of Terry, Thomas & Hoadley. The four thousand clocks having been completed in three years and sold at a good profit, Terry sold out to Thomas & Hoadley (1810) and established a business of his own at Plymouth Hollow. He concentrated his attention on one-day shelf clocks with wooden works rather than on uncased grandfather clocks, and in the course of the succeeding four years designed a number of different styles, making as many as several hundred clocks of each pattern.
It was not until 1814 that he devised a clock that completely satisfied him – his "perfected wood clock. " This shelf clock, which was called the "pillar scroll top case, " was made entirely of wood. It immediately took the popular fancy and in the course of the succeeding ten years drove out all other clocks for a time. With the help of his sons Terry gradually increased the production of these clocks to ten or twelve thousand a year, selling them at fifteen dollars each, and by 1825 is said to have accumulated a fortune of about a hundred thousand dollars.
In the course of his life he patented in the neighborhood of ten improvements in clocks, among them one issued on November 17, 1797, for an "equation" clock, which showed both apparent and mean time. In addition to manufacturing the popular shelf clock he made brass clocks of fine quality which were sold to watchmakers as regulators. He built, too, a number of tower clocks which were of novel design.
At the time of his death in Plymouth, in the part of the town known as Terryville, he was survived by the two sons of his second marriage, and two daughters and three sons of his first.
Terry was twice married, first on March 12, 1795, to Eunice Warner of Plymouth (d. December 15, 1839), and second to Mrs. Harriet Ann (Pond) Peck of Plymouth in October 1840. He was the father of eleven children, nine by his first marriage and two by his second.