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Clock club seeks $5,000 to repair Main Street timekeeper

By Bill Moss, Published: July 11, 2013

The Hendersonville City Council will take up a request to spend up to $5,000 to repair the historic McClintock clock on the side of the Trust Building on East Fourth Avenue at Main Street.

Mark Ray, a downtown shopkeeper, has asked the council to donate all or a part of the money needed to restore the clock, which was installed in 1927 or 1928 and has been maintained since 1993 by a local chapter of the National Association of Watch & Clock Collectors.
The original clock was driven by a mechanical electric clock inside the building, which sent a 24-volt signal to the outside clock every minute to activate four motion works and another signal every 15 minutes to set off the Westminster chimes inside the clock. The clock club has made a variety of changes, including installing an electronic quartz chiming clock and using a Radio Shack amplifier and a speaker for the chime.
"This current system has been maintained by Chapter 126 (of the clock collectors) but continues to have problems as the motion works are becoming less reliable and very difficult to repair," Ray said.
Ray and the clock club want to replace the older parts with four new McClintock movements and a controller. The total request comes to $2,615 worth of clock parts from Electric Time Co., of Medfield, Mass., $80 for cable, $500 for cleaning materials and paint, $800 to $1,200 to clock club members for labor and $605 for scaffolding and contingencies.
The clock was installed on the Fourth Avenue East side of Citizens Bank, a two-story stone façade Neo-Classical Revival building designed by Erle Stillwell, a prominent Hendersonville architect. The building also housed State Trust, Northwestern Bank, Home Bank and Trust and the Bank of North Carolina before it became the home of the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society.