Roland G. Murphy founded RGM Watch Co. in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania in 1992 after training in the Wostep watchmaking program in Switzerland and working at Hamilton Watch Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania during the brand's late-American era. The premise of RGM was to revive serious American watchmaking - both in retail watch production and in eventual in-house movement manufacture - in the spirit of the great 19th and early 20th century American makers (Hamilton, Waltham, Elgin, Illinois).
Through the 1990s and 2000s RGM built a small but growing reputation through its Caliber 20 reference (a 20-jewel pocket-watch-style wristwatch using an antique Hamilton Cal. 921 pocket-watch movement converted for wrist use), vintage-style cushion-cased dive references, and various small-batch dress watches with hand-engraved dials and damascened movements. The brand operated from a small workshop in Mount Joy with Roland and a small team of watchmakers handling design, assembly, and customer service personally.
The brand's most important technical milestone came in 2008 with the launch of the Caliber 801, the first American-designed-and-built mechanical watch movement in over fifty years. The Cal. 801 is a manual-wind movement with three-quarter plate, swan-neck regulator, and damascened bridges - all American-made at the RGM workshop. RGM also developed the Pennsylvania Tourbillon using the Cal. 801 base with an in-house tourbillon module, becoming the only American manufacture to produce a tourbillon since the early 20th century. Annual production remains small (estimated low hundreds of pieces) and the brand operates direct from Mount Joy with very limited dealer presence.
