Tick, tick, tick.
The 102-year-old clock perched in the attic of the Cole County Courthouse has started telling the time again and, for the first time since 2006, it’s doing it correctly.
Sean and Nancy Barnes, the owners of S&N Clock Repair, climbed up and down the three-story clock tower Thursday to re-install parts they’d taken back to their shop last weekend.
As part of a $10,000 agreement, the company took several pieces of the county’s historic clock back to their shop in Cape Girardeau for cleaning and repair.
Taking the parts out and bringing them back was no easy task. The “movement,” which is the main mechanism of the clock, sits in the attic of the courthouse, accessible through a small hallway tucked away on the third floor of the courthouse.
Getting to the top of the clock tower where the faces reside is a bigger journey.
To get there, a person has to climb an old, steep, ladder-like staircase to get to the level where the bell resides.
At this height, visitors are given an unobstructed view of much of Jefferson City. Even the taller buildings and church steeples don’t look so tall at this height.
The clock faces and “universal” mechanism reside even higher. Accessing this floor means climbing a 20-plus-foot tall ladder and going through a small hatch at the top.
As Sean Barnes tinkered with a dial on the movement, he and his wife explained this was not a full restoration, though they wished it was. As people who routinely work on clocks hundreds of years old, the couple enjoys getting to fully restore and repaint old clocks and bring them to their former glory.
Gallery: Courthouse Clock
Often, like in the case of the Stoddard County Courthouse clock, the family business even does pinstriping on the clocks, re-capturing the way the clocks looked in the ’20s and ’30s when they were first made.
Even without a full restoration, however, the Cole County Courthouse clock is nearly unrecognizable. What were once greasy, dirty, blackened clock parts are now gleaming gold and green bushings and gears.
Perhaps the dirtiest piece of the entire clock was the universal.
The universal is a piece that sits at the top of the tower and connects to the four clock faces. As the movement two stories below ticks and tocks, the universal turns the hands of the clock.
Before S&N Clock Repair came, the universal was covered in so much old grease and grime that it looked like tar.
“Oh my God, it was horrible. It was like mud,” Sean Barnes said.
While clocks aren’t meant to be greased, there are meant to be oiled. The Barneses said this clock in particular needs to be oiled quarterly.
However, instead of leaving that responsibility to general county maintenance workers who don’t know about clock maintenance, Nancy Barnes said they were looking into entering a service agreement with the county. That would allow S&N to come oil and perform maintenance on the clock as needed, preventing future harm caused by unknowing hands.
In addition to thoroughly cleaning the clock’s parts, Sean Barnes also made several new bushings for the clock. Bushings are brass or bronze cylinders with a hole in the center found all throughout clocks.
S&N’s ability to make their own bushings and other parts, instead of purchasing them, sets them apart from other clock repair businesses. Nancy Barnes said there are only about 200 clock repair shops in the country doing work at the same level as S&N.
While the clock is finally fixed, the project isn’t finished.
Just since late February, when the Cole County Commission first had S&N come look at the clock, the striker for the bell has fallen into disrepair. The striker is what hits the bell and makes it ring on the hour.
A cord that connected the striker (which looks like a sledgehammer) to the movement rusted out, meaning instead of ringing incorrectly, the clock tower’s bell hasn’t been ringing at all.
The wooden platform that holds the striker has also deteriorated and now wobbles as the striker rises and falls.
A couple of carpenters also climbed up the clock tower Thursday to take a look at the platform and see what it will take to fix it.
Even with the bell temporarily out of commission, the clock itself is back on time. For the first time in years, pedestrians can look up at the tower and know the hands show the true time.
And soon, too, the bell will ring out again.