Luther Stroup, a third-generation master clockmaker who has made 1866 grandfather clocks, with his daughter Victoria at Stroup Hobby Shop, in Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Photo / Sasha Arutyunova, The New York Times
Since the late 1940s, 2566 grandfather clocks have been produced by the Stroup Hobby Shop. Luther Stroup made 1866 of them.
There is a Stroup clock in all 50 states and each of America’s territories, Stroup said, most of which he delivered by hand.
Members of Congress own Stroup clocks, and they can be found in many humble churches and civic buildings in Spruce Pine, his small town in western North Carolina.
Stroup knows exactly how many clocks his family members have made because, for the last three generations, they have kept a record of every clock leaving their shop.
Despite piles of cherry wood, mahogany, walnut, maple and oak, tools dusted with a thin layer of sawdust, and machines covered by inches of the stuff, Stroup navigates his shop expertly.
He knows exactly which drawer holds his ledgers and the ephemera collected from decades of running a small family operation.
Stroup, 75, is a third-generation master clockmaker.
He learned the trade from his grandfather, a Baptist minister, and his father, a travelling salesperson, both of whom plied their craft after work hours.
“That’s why it’s called the Stroup Hobby Shop,” Stroup said, as he shovelled a small pile of sawdust into the wood-burning stove at the centre of the shop, the building’s only source of heat.
“For them, it was just a hobby.”
Though he grew up around the shop, Stroup started putting in fulltime hours in 1972. At the time, his grandfather was a few months behind on clock orders.
“So, I’d wake up every day and help him in the shop,” Stroup said.
By the following year, Stroup had turned the family hobby into a family business, making clocks for customers around the country, all of which was, and continues to be, promoted by word-of-mouth.
Since then, Stroup has made nearly 2000 clocks, building every part save “the movement”, which is clockmaker-speak for the clock’s mechanical apparatus. He imports those from a handful of companies in Germany or an importer in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Though Stroup grew up learning the clockmaking trade in his grandfather’s original shop – a small cinder-block building a few hundred metres down the road – the business has been based out of the same blue-sided tin building since 1976, on Stroup Road, which was once little more than the family driveway.
The road snakes around the hill behind the shop, where the house where Stroup was raised still stands. Today, the street is home to Stroup, his older brother and one of his daughters and her family.
Spruce Pine, population 2194, is a tiny town nestled amid some of the biggest peaks in eastern Appalachia, best known for its production of high-purity quartz.
It’s exactly the kind of place where you’d imagine grandfather clocks are built.
The town was nearly destroyed during Hurricane Helene. Stroup explained how most of the street, just a few metres above the banks of the North Toe River, was drowned in brown floodwaters. Six months removed from the storm, several of the buildings along the town’s main street were still boarded up.
Luckily, the Stroup Hobby Shop and its nearly a century of history was spared. Though the shop sits just a few hundred metres from the North Toe, its elevation – some 9m higher than the banks of the river – kept it somewhat safe.
Still, Stroup Rd was without power for nearly a month. During that time, Stroup devoted himself to restoring his property, his town and his community. He didn’t return to clockmaking until late December, three months after Helene hit.
When there were more hands in the shop, and when the demand for grandfather clocks was greater, the Stroup Hobby Shop produced two clocks a week.
These days, it takes about two months for Stroup to build a clock. He attributes the drop in output both to his age and the fact that his clocks are no longer in vogue.
Victoria, the youngest of Stroup’s three daughters, has been working alongside her father since returning to Spruce Pine in 2018.
She spent a few years assisting and apprenticing at her father’s shop, working fulltime and quickly becoming a master clockmaker herself.
During the company’s heyday, a Stroup clock sold for between US$550 ($921) and US$2500 (the equivalent of roughly US$1500 to US$6700 in 2025). Today, a Stroup clock starts at US$10,000.
Stroup has never seen the point in bloating his profit margins to pad his bottom line. It’s an ethos that was drilled into him more than 50 years ago, long before he first began building clocks.
“My grandfather’s philosophy was, ‘Put as much as you can into a clock and sell it for the least you can get by with in order to live,’” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Venutolo-Mantovani
Photographs by: Sasha Arutyunova
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES