A God-Tier Americana Collector Shares His Trove of Vintage Field Watches
This is an edition of the newsletter Box + Papers, Cam Wolf’s weekly deep dive into the world of watches. It’s currently being manned by Jeremy Freed, watch writer extraordinaire, while Cam is on parental leave. Sign up here.
If there is such a thing as a collector’s gene, Evan Morrison definitely has it. His office in Greensboro, NC, contains a museum’s worth of accumulated treasure ranging from antique industrial sewing equipment to WWII flight jackets to vintage bourbon.
A former vintage clothing picker with a passion for classic Americana, Morrison is the proprietor of Hudson’s Hill, a Greensboro-based retailer of American-made clothing, and the co-founder of the White Oak Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the legacy of Greensboro’s legendary Cone White Oak denim mill. He’s also one of the country’s foremost experts on Draper shuttle looms, which he uses to weave selvedge denim for Greensboro’s Proximity Manufacturing Company.
Given Morrison’s proclivity for vintage clothes and machinery, as well as his tendency to go full Pokémon on his areas of interest, it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that he’s a bit of a watch collector, too. Equally unsurprisingly, perhaps, his watch collection mirrors the rest of his hoard, leaning heavily towards patinated workwear-adjacent pieces—particularly field watches and flight watches—from the first half of the 20th century. I asked him to share a few of his favorites.
Victorinox Swiss Army watch
“My first watch was a $14.99 Casio, and at some point, it got crushed in the track of a car seat, but the watch that’s most memorable for me is a Swiss Army infantry watch that my mom bought for me back in 2001. It’s one of two I have that run on a battery, but it’s a classic, and when I was living in France, I had a friend of mine, Jacques Ferrand, make me a band for it out of shell cordovan. The other is my mom’s Eddie Bauer Hamilton quartz that she wore in the ’90s, which is still on the original strap.”
Courtesy of Evan Morrison
Courtesy of Evan Morrison
WWII Longines Weems Second-Setting watch
“I became interested in these through a book called Military Timepieces by Martin Whitney, which explains all about how Captain Philip Van Horn Weems figured out how to implement the use of second-setting for navigation. Basically, the rotating bezel enables a pilot to mark how far off his second hand is from chronometer time, so that he’s not continuously plotting more and more off course. I just thought it was pretty interesting, and so I searched around for one. The one that I particularly wanted, the mark VII, was unaffordable, but I managed to find one of the earlier ones for $400 or $500, and it’s beautiful. The only thing about it is these watches are quite small; it’s only got a 28-millimeter case.”
Courtesy of Evan Morrison
Bulova A17A
“This is a Bulova A17A, but, kind of like with flight jackets, some people reference the contract number, MIL-W-6433A. It’s a 17-jewel navigator’s watch that was produced in 1950 for the US armed forces, and it has a 12-hour, 24-hour, and seconds scale on a black dial with radium numbers. This one has some hands robbed off a different model, but they still have some radium on them, too. I was at an antiques event, and I was introduced to this guy who is the son of a clock painter—the guys who would paint the faces of public clocks in small towns—and he had a side business of fixing grandfather clocks and things. I showed my watch to him, and he said, ‘If you ever have others that you want me to work on, let me know. My dad left enough parts for two or three lifetimes.’ So I spent probably two years just collecting watches in whatever shape they were in and sending them to him. Some of them were too far gone, and some he could replace the hands or save the case. And that kind of set me on the journey of collecting. On some of my watches, everything is original, and on a few of them, it’s a hodgepodge. I’m not a purist about watches.”
