Pocket history

30 may 2006

Photo from The Mail Tribune - George and Lilliana Berry of Medford own a pocket watch that is believed to have belonged to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. (Mail Tribune / Jim Craven)

Did their ornate silver watch once tick in the pocket of Confederate President Jefferson Davis? A Medford couple, who paid a bundle for it at auction, believe it did and soon will head south to put it on display at the First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery, Ala.

Civil War buff George Berry, retired sales trainer with Lithia Motors, won't say what he and his wife, Lilliana, paid for the timepiece, which has been dated to the mid-19th century and was made by quality London watchmaker E.J. Dent. But it's insured for $100,000 and, he speculates, could be sold for $50,000 to $70,000.

Tales surrounding the pocket watch are rich and plentiful. It was displayed at Beauvoir, the Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library in Biloxi, Miss., on loan for two years 2002-04 from previous owner Tom Courchene. A year later, Hurricane Katrina devastated the historic buildings and contents.

The watch's authenticity hangs on the tale of a cobbler, Robert Balfour, in Lennoxville, Quebec, where Davis fled when bailed out of a Virginia prison two years after the Civil War. Davis was destitute and bartered the watch for a new pair of boots ? so goes the story, which was documented by descendants and family friends in the ensuing 140 years but not by Davis himself.

The watch is a key-wound, full hunter timepiece, meaning the case pops open both front and back and the watch is wound by a tiny key hung on the watch chain. It has Roman numerals for the hours and it resides in an intricately carved olive wood box, whose origin is unknown.

Holding the watch in his hand, Berry says it directly "puts me in touch with history and makes it personal. You can read all the books and look at all the pictures you want to, but this makes you feel you're there, like I can feel what he's feeling."

Berry has a massive research library on the Civil War, along with a collection of swords, presidential ballots, paper money, newspapers and other memorabilia from the time.

He got hooked on the Civil War, he says, while living as an adult in the South. A career Navy man, he appreciates the huge amount of suffering in the Civil War that "made America a country." Later this month, Berry and his wife, a Southern native, will give the watch on indefinite loan to the First White House, Davis' home while Montgomery was the Confederacy capital in 1861.

First White House regent Cameron Napier said "the ladies of the White House association are pleased and delighted" to add it to their extensive collection of Davis possessions, most left to them a century ago by his widow.

"We haven't fully reviewed its provenance and there is some doubt about authenticity, but we believe it was his, otherwise we wouldn't accept it," Napier said in a phone interview.

As to the likelihood of Davis, a former chief of state, humbly trading personal jewelry for footwear, Napier says, "Oh heavens yes, that happened all over the place after the war between the states. The South was devastated, everyone in financial straits and swapping."

The Confederate Museum in Richmond, Va., site of the second Confederate White House, has conferred with Beauvoir historians and told Berry they would receive the watch as a gift, without payment, an offer Berry said he refused but may accept in time.

Berry shows letters from these historic institutions, as well as Rice University in Houston, which has an extensive collection of Jefferson Davis papers. All have examined documentation from cobbler Balfour onward. "You seem to have more than enough circumstantial evidence to support your history of the Davis watch," the letter from Rice said.

Berry's considerable file documents the chain of possession from Balfour to his widow, Kathryn, to her eldest son, William, who scratched WB '84 inside the bezel. When he died the watch went back to his mother, then to her daughter Henrietta, then, in 1957, to a cousin, Helen Parks Wood, a former World War I nurse, then to Wood's husband, Raymond, who left it to his friends and caretakers, Tom and Doris Courchene.

"I believe it's authentic," says Berry. "The preponderance of evidence carries all the way through to today and there was no motive for fraud, and no one tried to get anything out of it. There's not one speck of evidence that says it's not true. There's tons of supporting evidence, everything short of Jefferson Davis walking up and saying, 'That's my watch.' "

Courchene in 2004 put the watch up for auction with Pontiac Exchange in Pontiac, Ill., and Berry's one bid was highest.

"They did everything wrong," notes Berry. "They should have put it up with a prestigious house like Sotheby's and put every red-blooded, deep-pocketed Southern gentleman in the same room, with free liquor, tell them we've got a deep-pocketed Yankee bidder on the phone and let them fight it out."

Her husband's passion for the Civil War has led Lilliana Berry to a pursuit of women's writings of the times ? "a whole different outlook than the public view in the South of the war," she said. "So much suffering ? and the watch represents that time and belonged to one of the small number of leaders who were calling the shots and brought such devastation to both North and South."

John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.