Dave Welch makes a living out of time, yet he doesn’t wear a watch. “Don’t need one,” he said, swiveling his chair to better survey the vast array of clocks in his Vergennes domain — big ones, small ones, tall ones, broad ones, clocks seated or standing, on boxes or shelves, on the floor or a desk. Some look grandfatherly, and others are going cuckoo.
How many are there? “Don’t know,” Welch said with a shrug. How does one count cacophony, anyway?
Welcome to the Clock Shop, as the late writer and television personality Rod Serling might have intoned in his introduction to “The Twilight Zone.” The 36-year-old Addison County clock retail and repair shop is a repository of things past and present. A place seemingly out of time yet suffused with time’s passage, timeless yet time-dependent.
“Dave is so passionate about his craft and so good at it, and he’s such a character to boot.”
Suzanne Ellis
Customers must circumnavigate Vergennes’ landmark Kennedy Brothers building on Main Street to reach the modest backside entry to the shop. An ancient green safe sits inside the front door, signifying nothing. Stairs to the left and a ramp to the right lead to a large room with a thousand faces, marking time. An inventory of clocks such as this is rare in today’s world; rarer still is the man who can fix them.
Welch, 67, likes all clocks but particularly mechanical clocks that are weight driven, because they keep time more precisely. Also Seth Thomas-made clocks and so-called banjo clocks produced by Simon Willard in the 1800s. He has a grandfather clock with an octagonal top and a cuckoo that chimes with a parade of figurines.
Donna Bushey of New Haven, who has known Welch for 30 years and many clocks, said she once offered to organize this vast collection of timepieces.
“No, no, no!” Welch exclaimed. “I’d never be able to find anything.”
Welch holds court seated at a workbench littered with the detritus of clockmaking — mainspring keys, tiny precision screwdrivers, a magnification loupe, and myriad springs, cogs and weights. If Father Time were flesh and blood, he might look like Welch: a fluffy white thatch of hair, bushy eyebrows, a knowing smile that reaches his eyes and a barrel of a torso, attesting to a sedentary job. Due to neuropathy, his left foot bears an orthopedic boot the size of an umbrella stand.
Despite the boot, Welch’s greatest satisfaction lies in repairing the town clocks of St. Albans, Shelburne and Bristol. Accessing the towers in which these large clocks reside is no small thing: It requires climbing a ladder or a spiral staircase to reach a platform, then squeezing into the clock room through a narrow passage that only a spelunker might appreciate.
And, unlike most physicians, this clock doctor makes house calls for those stately but tricky grandfathers.
Back in the day, Welch’s little shop of horology would not have been anything to write about. Finding artisans now who can diagnose and repair timepieces, however, is akin to searching for rocking-horse poop.
“I would guess there are about five or six of us in Vermont,” said John Appelt of Brandon, adding that beyond telling time, the guts of clocks and watches are different. Appelt rules the wrist, and Welch specializes in everything else that ticks.
“I love clocks,” Welch said. “I really like all things mechanical.”
The shopkeeper said he spends an average of two and a half hours on a repair. He earned about $6,000 for his work on the Shelburne town clock but has been known to accept a hug as payment. His many loyal customers are aware that his shop phone won’t be answered until noon, even though Welch has already been there for hours.
Most of the clocks in the shop are of his own collection, amassed from donations by customers, friends, and even strangers who haunt estate sales and flea markets. Even when clocks were widely desired, he didn’t sell many.
Now the business is “mainly trading with my friends and fellow hobbyists,” Welch explained. Plus lots and lots of repairs, a narrow income stream that pays the bills. Fellow enthusiast Dale Kreisler of Rutland, also adept at fixing timepieces, said he consults with Welch on cases he finds intractable, and “most of the time he can give me a solution over the phone” without even seeing the clock.
A few weeks ago, Suzanne Ellis drove from her South Hero home to have the mechanism in a shelf clock replaced. She doesn’t mind the long drive. “Dave is so passionate about his craft and so good at it, and he’s such a character to boot,” she said. “It’s just an absolutely refreshing human experience.”
As a 5-year-old, Welch could tell time. When he was 10, his grandfather gave him several old alarm clocks, which Welch promptly dissected to see what made them tick. After college, when he failed to parlay his University of Vermont mechanical engineering degree into a job at IBM or General Electric, Pat Boyden of the Green Mountain Clock Shop in Williston took him on.
Welch knew nothing about clocks, he told Boyden, but he knew how mechanical things worked. He was a quick study on desk and wall clocks, but he found his life’s passion in 1982 when he assisted Boyden in the repair of the 115-year-old town tower clock in Bristol. In 1989, Welch struck out on his own and opened the Clock Shop.
Every so often, Welch takes time on the road. As president of the Green Mountain Timekeepers Society, a chapter of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors, Welch convenes with other members for occasional meet and greets around the state to talk about clocks and advise owners on whether a repair is worthwhile.
“It’s ‘Antiques Roadshow,’” Kreisler explained, “without the value appraisals.” A recent session in South Hero drew a large crowd.
Welch is also a history buff (that’s history writ large, not just clockmaking) and will readily opine about current events (Is the current presidential administration existing on borrowed time or just plain cuckoo?). He doesn’t care for deadlines and has been known to clock out on projects due to be completed. In June 2024, Bushey brought in a clock for Welch to see if it was worth fixing. Labor Day came and went, with no word. When Bushey finally called, Welch admitted that her clock was still unexamined and he’d check it immediately. She was amused, not ticked off.
Asked about the incident, Welch grinned. “Time,” he said, “is not important to me.”
The Clock Shop, 11 Main St., Vergennes, 989-8881
This story was updated on Friday, October 10, to include a new phone number for the Clock Shop.
The original print version of this article was headlined “On the Clock | Time waits for no man, but Dave Welch makes it run at the Clock Shop in Vergennes”
This article appears in Nest — Fall 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!