Time & place

For merchants and others in Granbury’s historic district, the chiming of the clock at the pinnacle of the courthouse is part of the city’s charm.

Employees in the county’s Facilities Maintenance department agree, but don’t particularly like being in the process of winding the apparatus when the bell tolls at the top of the hour.

“You’ll scramble out of there pretty quick,” said Facilities Maintenance Director and Tolar native Jay Riley. “It’s happened to all of us. We just pretty much scurry out of the way.”

Riley and the six employees in his department might be able to “scurry” now that they’ve had plenty of practice climbing the stairs and rung ladders to the farthest reaches of the courthouse, but the same might not be true for the average person wanting to sneak a peak at one of the last remaining hand-wound clock tower mechanisms in the state.

The courthouse has three stories. The clock tower stretches three more stories above the mansard roof system.

Climbing to the floor where the clock-winding mechanism is located and then yet another floor to where the bell is located involves iron rung ladders and a sturdy constitution.

“I never realized the bell was as large as it was,” Riley said. “It’s about five-foot across. It’s a big bell, and it hangs from the original wood stanchions. When you look at it, it’s like, how in the world did they ever get that up there?”

Although all of the people who currently wind the clock are men (Riley, Tony Ridley, Brent Newman, Victor Zambrano, Mark Adwell, Justin Cray and Gary Tillison), local historian Karen Nace took on the challenge many times when she was the court administrator for then-County Judge Andy Rash. She thought it was fun.

Nace said that she often took people up to the clock tower when they requested a tour.

“Because the judge was a good sport and nobody seemed to worry about the liability of it, he let me take whoever I wanted to up to the tower,” said Nace, who told visitors brave enough to make the climb that they were “on their own” in terms of the physical agility it required.

Over the decades, some who visited the clock tower wrote their names or other messages on the walls.

Nace recalled the time a Dallas woman who was in her 70s visited Granbury for her birthday and requested an inside view of the courthouse clock tower. She enjoyed it so much that she returned the following year.

“She wanted to wind the clock on her birthday,” Nace said.

Like the current county maintenance employees, Nace wound the clock twice each week even though it is “an eight-day clock.”

Nace and Riley explained that the cables basically run the heighth of the courthouse and that if they wound the clock just once a week, the job would take twice as long and be twice as hard.

Riley said that the twiceweekly windings take about 20 minutes. Nace remembers it taking her 30 minutes or longer.

Riley noted that clockwinders don’t particularly want to spend a lot of time in the clock tower “especially if it’s 100 degrees outside.”

The close quarters were toasty Tuesday afternoon when Riley, Ridley and Newman took two HCN staffers to see the mechanism.

The clock has four faces – one on each side of the courthouse steeple. Riley said that the cables regulate the “time and chime.” The weights are “quite heavy,” he said.

“Its like a boat winch built onto the clock,” he said. “Best I can tell, they’re at a specific weight and that’s what gives the clock its accuracy. They just ratchet down. They will go nearly to the bottom floor.”

PIECE OF HISTORY

A nameplate attached to the clock mechanism bears the name “Seth Thomas Clock Co.” of Thomaston, Connecticut. It also bears the date April 16, 1891.

The current courthouse was built in 1890-91 of Brazos limestone.

Newman, who has worked for the county almost two years, about the same time as Riley, said that he didn’t notice the first time he climbed the clock tower that the historic timepiece was made near the town where he grew up. His dad pointed out the coincidence when Newman sent him a photo of the mechanism.

Newman said he was born in Bristol and spent much of his childhood there but then moved to Harwinton – pretty much the same distance that Acton is from Granbury, he said.

Newman said that he wanted to move and chose Granbury by simply pointing to a spot on a map.

Riley said that Newman and Ridley figured out how to repair the clock when it developed a problem. A man who is in his 80s and is one of the few people able to repair historic timepieces was unable to get to it because he was busy with other work, the maintenance director said.

Newman and Ridley pinpointed a brass gear that had been worn down.

“They said, ‘We need to find somebody to weld this up,’” Riley recalled. “Well, I’m kind of a welder myself, so I took it home.”

Riley said that he and his crew were aware of the need to be extremely careful but made the decision to try to repair the clock themselves “when we couldn’t get anybody out to look at it and were aware of the importance of it, especially around the holidays.”

The team’s work did the trick, and the clock has been “working fine ever since,” Riley said.

Newman and Ridley said that they didn’t feel intimidated working on the clock.

“I like figuring things out,” said Ridley, who spent years doing maintenance work for apartment complexes and nursing homes and also working general construction.

He continued, “It took days and days of sitting there staring at it to figure out what did what before we decided (what to do). We fixed four different things, I believe, to make it work.”

Nace praised former county maintenance director John Sampson for the expert care he provided the timepiece.

“He refurbed it,” she said. “He was amazing, the work he did. He taught me how to oil and wind it. I think I only oiled it once a week. You didn’t want to over-oil it.”

Riley said the courthouse clock is “a landmark.”

He stated that as a youth he and his friends would hang out at the square. When the clocked chimed, he said, “we’d say, well, we better go home.”

kcruz@hcnews.com | 817-573-7066, ext. 267

As a youth he and his friends would hang out at the square. When the clocked chimed “we’d say, well, we better go home.”

JAY RILEY County Facilites Maintenance Director