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Ingenuity means courthouse has more than 1 clock
For the Observer-Reporter
newsroom@observer-reporter.com
WAYNESBURG - Thanks to a nice piece of synchronicity, Greene County now has two courthouse clocks up and running - one on the courthouse itself, the other at the Greene County Historical Society Museum.
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"The clock stopped sometime late last summer. We all noticed within a day or two," Chief Clerk Gene Lee said. The bell still rang out the hour and the half hour, because of a separate timer, but the hands of time were frozen on all four sides of the courthouse tower.
Lee tracked down the old records to find the company that sold and installed the motor and contacted them about the problem.
"They sent someone out to look at it, and three months went by before they told us they couldn't repair the motor and it would cost $12,000 to replace it," Lee said.
You don't have to be a chief clerk to know that's a lot of money for a five-pound motor.
But then, synchronicity kicked in, Greene County style. George "Bly" Blystone, chief tinkerer at the Historical Society museum, already had climbed the Mt. Everest of clock repair. He, the Rev. Robert Peters, Matt Casper and Dave Maset had just finished the monumental task of getting the thousands of pounds of counterweights, pendulums and cast iron gears of the original courthouse clock to work.
That first clock was installed in the courthouse tower in 1926 after sparks from the Downey House fire damaged the tower and it had to be rebuilt and refurbished from scratch.
When the county 'poor farm' became the historical society museum in 1971, it was about the time that the new, much smaller timing motor was installed to run the courthouse clock. The broken remains of the old clockworks were handed over to become a first exhibit at the new museum. A hole was cut in the floor so that the gears could be exhibited on the second floor and the pendulum and counterweights could dangle down to the room below. And there it sat, lost to time until Blystone got a hankering to fix it in 2007. Tinkering with the 200-pound counterweights didn't do the trick, so Blystone looked for help.
"He was telling me about it at work, and one day we drove over on our lunch hour so I could take a look," Fox Ford mechanic Matt Casper said. "I said 'Wow! That's pretty neat!' I helped Bly take it apart and found the bushings were galled up. I have a little lathe, so I got them cleaned up." Maset had the right tools to make sure the old brass gears were still round and with more tinkering, the geared weights and pendulum began keeping perfect time.
"We got it working in time for the Harvest Festival in October," Blystone said. "After that, I started looking for some of the history behind the clock, looking through county records for repair bills, things like that. I was hoping the county could help us buy a four-foot-round face for it. I want to put it in the window at the museum and back light it so that it can be seen from the road."
When Blystone came to Lee's office in November looking for funds for a clock face, Lee was still glaring at the hefty replacement bill. It was a historic moment in the making.
"After we talked, Gene asked me if I could take a look at the clock motor, see if there was something I could do to fix it. I said sure," Blystone said. "I asked him if he would pay for parts and buy a face for the clock at the museum, and he said sure. So I climbed up there and took a look."
After a first, then a second look, Blystone was ready to take the challenge. Peters, a retired clock repairman with his own collection of timepieces on display at the museum, knew that repair was possible if replacement gears could be found. Blystone had a hunch that those gears were somewhere on the Internet.
"The motor was made by Berdine Motors. I found their webpage and called them. They said they don't make that motor anymore, but gave me the number of The Electric Motor Co. in California. They had the blueprints for this motor and were able to machine new gears per those specs. We got the clock running again on Valentines Day."
The repair job that supposedly couldn't be done is over and done with, and Lee couldn't be happier.
"I'm not mechanically inclined, but thank God George (Blystone) and the other gentlemen were!"
