Bahnhäusle

I have spent far too much time researching cuckoos.

There are approximately 1 zillion cuckoo's out there made by scores of companies and many of them, especially earlier cuckoo's have little to no identifying manufacturers markings. They're still in production for tourists far and wide and while there are still some made with incredibly high quality many were and are cheap knock offs. I think I've looked at every photo of a cuckoo ever published.

Still don't know who made my cuckoo but zeroed in on a date range from the 1890's to about 1915. Probably on the early side of that range. Interesting post to come on the dating effort.

Cuckoo's have a few different principle styles. The classic is a typically a brown wooden case with carved birds and leaves. There are chalet styles with figures around a house and hunter styles with a dear heads, rifles and, typically, some draped dead animals. Best examples of the styles come from the Black Forest region of Germany.

Mine is known as a Railroad or Station House style which was originally designed in 1850 by a German architect, Friedrick Eisenlohr, as part of a contest. There is no English version of the wikipedia entry for Eisenlohr but here's the German version and there's a lot of material on him in the broader entry for cuckoo clocks. Eisenlohr designed and built railroad buildings and they inspired his design. In German the style is known as Bahnhäusle.

Here's a copy of his original drawing and prototype of der Bahnhäusle Kuckucksuhr:

This style is still being emulated in many cuckoos today.

Here's one very, very similar to mine:

More on dating and repairing the clock soon.