Longines Manual Pocket Watch Personal Watch of Pancho Villa

Longines Manual Pocket Watch Personal Watch of Pancho Villa - Manual winding. Silver original Longines HC with beautiful engraving detail ( 56 mm ). White enamel dial with Roman numerals. Longines, Swiss, believed to have been a personal watch of pancho villa, famed general of the Mexican Revolution,.

Pre-owned with 10 inch silver chain and with a series of photographs and documents that were paired with the watch during its early chain of provenance, and with printed copies of three newspaper articles citing early owner's names that match to some of the items included here.

The story that emerges from the three newspaper articles (which were in the January 9th, 1925 edition of the "Buffalo Evening News" of Buffalo, NY; the January 20th, 1925 edition of the "Intelligencer Journal" of Lancaster, PA; and in the January 7th, 1930 edition of the "Times Herald" of Olean, New York) is of a "large sterling silver Swiss watch" which Pancho Villa received from a French nobleman and then in turn gave to John Wells, who befriended Villa while stationed in Mexico for six months, and who in turn passed away on Christmas of 1924 leaving the watch to his nephew Carl F. Quinlan.

Among the additional items with the watch are an early typed document detailing the division of the estate of Carl F. Quinlan including the passage of the "Pancho Villa (sic) Watch" to his son, Carl S. Quinlan, a 1920 passport for William J. Wells which is described in a small type written note as "Passport of John Wells is from a later trip.
In all a fascinating bit of Mexican Revolution history, we have no further documentation or history beyond what is presented here with the lot, but we do find this to be sufficiently compelling in establishing the likely validity of the watch as having indeed belonged to Pancho Villa.