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The Contract Grades
Some of these can categorized as private labels, but for the sake of convenience, any name with a town, state or location is logged as a private label, while any impersonal name like the Olympia Special, made for Chicago wholesaler Lapp & Flershem, is cataloged as a named grade. There are quite a few, such as the Athabasca and the Diamond grades, that certainly could have been made by contract, given their singular appearances in large production runs, but since no paper trail has surfaced they will continue to be included on this page.
Some grades were confined to a specific model, such as the Yale being produced only in the Old Eagle line, while others, like the Republic and the Knickerbocker, are present in several models. To see examples of each named grade in a given model, visit its respective page.
Company Use
The use of named grades was likely a marketing strategy, one that would be mimicked by automakers decades later, with impressive appellations such as Criterion, Monarch, Providence and Sentinel, and usually in quantities greater than a dozen. There were also those special grades for people and places, like the Henry Molineux, a close friend of Seth Thomas's grandson, and the Maiden Lane, the location of the company's corporate offices in New York City, and many more that the origins of which will almost certainly never be known.
Still others, like the Chautauqua, can have assumptions made to be named after the Chautauqua Institute in New York, founded in 1874.
Supplying Retailers
Another source of contract grades were those made specifically for retailers, such as the 20th Century for mail-order giant Montgomery Ward or Sears, Roebuck & Company's popular Edgemere line. They were blocked during regular production for large runs of hundreds or even thousands at a time. These can also be called private labels, since they were made specifically by contract, but for the ease of categorizing any name with a town, state or location is logged as a private label, while any general name is cataloged as a named grade. This was done because it will likely never be known if smaller blocks were created at the factory or for a buyer, like the Bismark, Tribune or Waldorf.
Factory Cost
Other factories charged extra for special markings, though no prices for this service appears in any of the surviving Seth Thomas catalogs. The matching dials for the various named grades were offered at cost.
Seth Thomas Highlights
The rarest regular-production two-tone pattern of all, made in one block of seventy - and then never again.