Answer Man: Courthouse clock hands under repair

Editor’s note: Answer Man offers answers to questions submitted by readers about people, places and things in the Marion area. To submit questions, email jjarvis@marionstar.com, call 740-375-5154, send a Facebook message or contact him via Twitter, @jmwjarvis.

Question: What’s happening with the Marion County courthouse clock? Where are the hands?

Answer: The clock hands on the south and east faces of the clock are in South Charleston, where Phil Wright is “putting the last couple of coats of paint” on.

The Marion County Board of Commissioners hired The Tower Clock Co., which Wright owns, to repair the clock hands, Ken Stiverson, commissioners president, said.

“The hands were made out of metal, and they corroded and they were sticking,” Stiverson said. “ ... They’d stick every so often when they went by each other.”

Wright repaired hands, on the west and north faces, in July 2013 after the minute hand fell off the clock’s west face and he discovered the hands were loose on the north clock face.

As he did those hands, he is replacing the hands on the south and east faces with ones made of sugar pine that he’s fabricated in his shop in South Charleston.

“I’m going back to the original sugar pine hands, three-quarter inch thick, three-eights on the outer edges,” he said. “They’re exact copies of what originally was on the building.”

Maintained properly, the pine hands will “last a hundred years.”

He said the hands he repaired in 2013 were made of plastic glass.

“They were lightweight, and the wind could blow them into each other,” he said.

He said motorists and pedestrians accustomed to looking up at the clock to get the time will be able to do so again by the end of the week.

“You’re looking pretty good,” he said. “By the end of the week, I’ll have you up and going. ... I’m cleaning them up a little bit. The style they had up there wasn’t a very good design, so we’re going back with the original style on that, too.”

Marion County’s most prominent timepiece is impressive, he said.

“The mechanism is a great mechanism, a No. 3 E. Howard,” he said. “It’s still just a classic. It’s nice that you’ve still got it,” he said, adding that many courthouses have replaced their original mechanisms with new movements. “It’s a beast. The thing’s huge. It’s very accurate. E. Howards were considered to be (made by) the finest clock maker in the country, very sought-after.”

He estimated he would have the hands back on the clock by the end of the week.

“It’s been so humid I’ve had trouble getting the paint to dry,” he said. “I like to get about 10 coats of paint on them to get them as smooth as silk.”

Replacing the 4-foot-long hands will extend the life of the clock’s gears and the entire mechanism.

“Originally when the clock was hand-wound, it would run off tension and if the hands were out of balance the clock would just stop. ... Now, that’s it’s been electrified it keeps running until it tears something up. What they’re doing is definitely good for the clock.”

Cost of the replacement is about $3,000, he said.

“It’s one of those things that need to be done,” Stiverson said, adding that the county contracts for maintenance to be done twice yearly on the clock, “but this is beyond that.”

He said the commissioners have received numerous phone calls from passersby used to finding the time towering above as they drive along Center and Main streets.

“It’s something we feel we need to maintain for the community, history, I guess,” he said. “We want to keep a little history there.”