The picture of the gorgeous Prague clock in SJohnson’s Thursday diary got me to thinking about the Bily brothers and their clocks.
If you are ever in northeast Iowa be sure to go to Spillville. Settled in the 1860s by Bohemian, Swiss, and German immigrants, Spillville features several attractions. Along with the world’s smallest church (one of them anyway), you can visit the room where Antonín Dvořák wrote two of his most famous chamber works, the String Quartet in F (“The American”) and the String Quartet in E-Flat.
What is really worth seeing, though, is the Bily Clock Museum. Frank and Joseph Bily were two Czech-American bachelor farmers who took up clock making as a hobby during the winters. Between 1913 and 1958 they completed over twenty clocks. The largest, The Apostles Parade, stands nine feet ten inches tall. The most elaborate American Pioneer History took them four years to complete. In 1928, Henry Ford offered them one million dollars for it. They turned him down. When a beloved younger sister died, to whom they had planned to leave the clocks, they almost burned them all up, but fortunately were persuaded to leave them to the town of Spillville instead.