Moutier

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Aerial view of Moutier, 1931

Moutier-Grandval is a District in Grand Val of the Bernese Jura region of Canton Neuchâtel, Switzerland. It is located between Court, connected through the gorges de Court, to the south and Délemont to the north. It dominates the Grand Val, which also contains the smaller towns of Grandval and Corcelles.

Overview

Moutier was primarily an agricultural district until the 1850s. It is a low valley not a high plateau with poor soil and interminable winters like the Franches-Montagnes. The land offered agricultural and cultural resources unlike Saignelégier, Noirmont, or Les Bois, and was able to support a good quality of life for resident farmers through the 19th century. There was no watchmaking in the Birse valley until the 1850s, though 400 inhabitants lived there, and the villages upstream were purely agricultural.

Around 1820 or 1830 Isaac Schaffter of La Dozerce made watches with matching wheels as well as weight-powered pendulum clocks. Mr. Mérillat also operated a watch business in Moutier employing two or three workers before 1850.

Moutier was linked by rail to Basel in 1876, following a route through the gorge north of the town through Delémont. The following year another railroad line was added, connecting the town to Bienne through the Vallée de Tavannes, passing through Court, Malleray, Reconvillier, and Tavannes. In 1908 a line to Solothurn was added, passing through Corcelles, Oberdorf, and Langendorf. Finally, the 8.6 kilometer Grenchenberg tunnel was completed in 1915, linking Moutier directly to Grenchen, Pieterlen, and Bienne.

Société Industrielle Grande Fabrique

See Also Société d'Horlogerie de Moutier

Watchmaking in Moutier began with the opening of the "Grande Fabrique" built on the banks of the Birse river at the western end of the village. This spot had previously housed various industries but the new factory erected in 1851 and 1852 housed about a hundred workers in one central building focused on roughing and finishing of watch movements. Because the cost of living was cheap, the work was simple and low-skilled, but this allowed the town to grow to about 1000 at this time.

The Moutier factory grew, producing cylinder escapements and pinions, and the building was enlarged. The factory began to produce complete watches, first key-wound and then crown-wound, between 1865 and 1870. At this point the Moutier company employed 500 workers and delivered 40,000 watches a year. By this time the population of the village of Moutier was 1,946. More specialized workshops were added in Moutier during this period, including a workshop for the manufacture of dials and another for gilding.

The Moutier-Grandval factory is listed in Indicateur Davoine through 1913.

Société d'Horlogerie de Moutier (Moutier Watch Co.) also known as Radium Watch Co. failed on January 27, 1914 and was deleted on November 4. The company advertised that it was founded in 1849 suggesting that it was the successor to the original Grande Fabrique.

Junker

In 1883, Nicole Junker (1851-) founded the Société Industrielle d'Horlogerie to produce lathes to turn bars of metal into spindles and pinions for watches. His company rapidly grew into an important watchmaking supplier. Junker's company was continued as "Pornos" after 1917. Other important industrialists at this time included André Bechler, founded in 1904, and Jos. Pétermann SA.

In 1888 the population had risen over 2,100 and the "Grande Fabrique du Nord" was built, which employed 700 to 800 workers by the end of the century. Other factories for roughing and finishing, assortments, case manufacturing, nickel-plating, gold-plating, oxidizing, engraving, enamelling, and so on were also built.

Two factors contributed to the rise of the watch industry in Moutier at that time: The construction of the Delémont-Bienne railway between 1874 and 1877 and the 1895 installation of electric power and light. The village was home to 2,583 people in 1896, 3,094 in 1900, 4,182 in 1910, and over 4,500 in 1915. By this time the watch industry employed about 750 people, plus about 100 workers from outside who traveled to the town to work.

In the 1930s, Moutier continued to be a center of production for automatic milling and turning machines, adding the "Azuréa" watch factory of Célestin Konrad, the alarm clock factory of Louis Schwab, and the watch ebauche finishing company of Erwin Girard. The population in 1940 exceeded 5,000 people. Another important manufacturer there was Pierce SA.

Léon Lévy and Pierce

See Also: Pierce

Léon Lévy et Frères was a watchmaking company established in Bienne in 1883. The firm expanded not by building a large factory there but by marketing watches made by others. Rather than compete for workers in the rapidly-rising watchmaking town, the Lévy brothers established a factory in Moutier.

By 1896, Léon Lévy et Frères had established an operation in Moutier, and this would grow to become the focus of the company. Lévy Fréres purchased 23 acres of land in the town from a Bernese banker in the 1890s for 21, 420 francs. Although the company's official address remained in Bienne for another decade at least, the "Usine a Moutier, G. V." (Moutier steam-powered factory) was increasingly important to the company and the large factory was even featured in advertisements in the 1940s.

The sons of Léon Lévy established the Pierce brand name for export watches in the 1930s. Following the death of the company's namesake the firm increasingly took the name Pierce locally as well. Pierce became a well-known dissident watchmaker in the 1930s and 1940s, producing most components of their proprietary watches in-house at the Moutier factory. The factory remained the center of production for Lévy and Pierce through at least 1958, when ebauche production was absorbed by Ebauches SA.

Vénus

Main Article: Fabrique d'ébauches Vénus

Paul Berret (1888-1949), often mistaken as "Perret", was the son of a wine merchant from Cornol who settled in Delémont as a youth. After his technical studies he became a technical manager at A. Schild SA in Grenchen. On May 1, 1924, he came to Moutier to purchase the factory of Victor Spozio to set up a new ebauche factory there. The Spozio Frères factory had been set up in 1918 and was focused on precision machining.

Fabrique d'ébauches Vénus SA was established in Moutier on May 14, 1924. The company was operated by Paul and Jean-Baptiste Berret of Cornol and Otto Schmitz of Granges. The firm received its first watch movement patent on April 22 of that year, suggesting a quick development. Jean-Baptiste Perret retired the following year and was replaced by Kurt Henggeler of Unter-Aegeri.

Vénus was acquired by Ebauches SA by March of 1928. On May 3, 1933, Henggeler and Schmitz were removed from administration, replaced by Ebauches managers Sydney de Coulon and Paul Berret. Berret would remain in charge of the Moutier factory through May 19, 1947, and died on November 22, 1949 in Moutier.

Ebauches SA and ETA

Ebauches SA absorbed Fabrique d'ébauches Vénus in 1928. This company occupied the former Spozio factory located at Rue du Viaduc 21 along a railroad spur in the center of the town.

Vénus became famous within Ebauches SA for a range of complicated movements, notably chronographs but also alarms. The company was an originator of the cam-actuated chronograph concept that would later be adopted by Valjoux.

The Vénus factory was closed in 1983 as Ebauches SA consolidated into ETA. But in 1992, ETA re-started operations in the town, now located in a different factory at Rue de la Paix 90 near the central railroad barn. A few years later ETA expanded this factory and soon added another factory nearby at Rue des Fleurs 17, the former site of the grand Moutier school building.

Moutier Watchmakers

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