How is the character Eli Willard important to the story?

The major character who complements Jacob Ingledew is the Yankee peddlar Eli Willard, the novel's purveyor of the products of progress. He keeps Stay More changing. By bringing his manufactured, commercial products from the East, he encourages Stay More's consumer growth and brings it news from the outside world. Eli appears in Stay More as soon as Jacob and Noah finish building their cabin, and the first item he sells them is, significantly, a wooden clock, which runs too fast. When he returns the next year, he sells them a brass clock, which "compensated for the old one by being as slow as the old one was fast." Eli Willard represents change.