Clock has more than 120 years of history
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No Comments [ Add Comment ]By CHARLES F. TRENTELMAN
Standard-Examiner staff
BRIGHAM CITY -- The sun was edging over the mountains when Blake Petersen, feet scuffing sand and raising clouds of dust, made his way to the cupola of the old Box Elder County courthouse to work on the clock.
The wooden stairs creaked, dust flew, but renovation work on the courthouse has scared off the pigeons so there weren't feathers and droppings to deal with. Just construction tools.
Petersen, a clock maker who lives in Kaysville, was embarking on the latest step in a 13-year-long project to restore the clock in the Box Elder courthouse tower. Like everything to do with that clock, the work is long, dusty and frustrating.
This trip was to take apart the gears that work the hands on the four clock faces.
The gears, being 120 years old, don't work well. A heavy wind or pigeons sitting on the clock hands throws them off by a few minutes.
Pigeon-caused imprecision bothers Petersen.
Taking the gears apart was not easy.
Screws that have sat for decades lock in place. Ancient shafts coated with rock-hard grease don't slip. Sandblasting to clean the building's stones has coated everything with grit.
Petersen is thin and quick, but it still took two hours of twisting, wrenching, unscrewing and applying a torch to one set of gears before he finally got everything apart.
One glass face was cracked before Petersen got there, so he took it out and will have a new one made. The goal is to have it all back together by Peach Days, which start Wednesday.
The hands that Petersen was removing are the public face of a clock that has a long and serendipitous history.
Box Elder County bought a clock for the courthouse tower in 1887 at a cost of $433. That's close to $13,000 in today's money.
For decades that clock rang a massive bell that still hangs in the cupola. Someone had to climb the tower every day to wind the weights that drove the clock. The pulleys for the weights and cables are still in place.
Nobody is sure exactly when, but sometime in the late 1940s the mechanical clock quit working. Instead of fixing it, the county shoved it to one side. They attached electric clockworks to the drive shafts that turn the hands on the four faces of the cupola and bought electronic chimes to replace the bell.
That setup doesn't require someone to climb the stairs every day, but lacks the style of the original. While one electric clock drives the hands, a second, smaller, clock enclosed in an old Farr's Ice Cream tub makes the chimes ring.
Things may have stayed that way forever, but in 1995 J. Val Roberts, a visiting attorney from Bountiful who is interested in Utah's tower clocks, asked to visit Box Elder's. He found it in the tower, in pieces and covered in filth.
A news story about his visit brought community volunteers and Ogden clock maker Richard DuPont, who offered to fix it. A community restoration project, costing thousands of dollars and much donated work, put the main works of the clock back in order and on display in the courthouse lobby.
In 2004 DuPont had moved on and the clock's works, with no regular maintenance, had stopped again. Roberts, still interested, located Ballard Gardner, a tower clock expert in Orem.
In a lucky coincidence, just when Roberts was calling Gardner, Petersen wandered into the courthouse on other business.
"I went right upstairs and said 'That clock's not working. I want to fix it,' " he remembered. He joined Gardner and now has a contract with Box Elder County to maintain the clock.
"It's keeping pretty darn good time," he said Tuesday morning. "I come up every three or four months and it's usually within a minute or two." Accuracy like that is not unusual in these clocks, he said.
In addition to restoring the gears on the clock faces, the mechanism on display in the courthouse lobby still needs work.
The work started in 1995 was not complete. The main clock mechanism, the part that ticks and drives the clock hands, was done, Petersen said, but the part that raises a hammer that hits the bell in the cupola, still is not repaired.
DuPont was not able to fix that because a key gear is missing. Petersen has a similar gear from another tower clock, but it's the wrong size. The correct-size gear and a couple of smaller parts will have to be made, he said.
The original clockworks will never drive the clock hands on the tower, he said. That would involve moving the clockworks from their display back up the tower and then nobody could see them.
"The only thing in question is if they're going to use the mechanism downstairs to strike the old bell," he said. That could be rigged up.
That would be very cool, he said, because seeing those old clocks do their thing is half the fun: Watching the massive pendulum swing and, when the clock gets to the hour, "watching when the flywheel starts spinning and raising the hammer."
People will be able to hear the clock hit the bell, and when Petersen's done with the hands they'll be on time as well.
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