A crew from Whitfield Sign Company raised the new dial to the west face of the Bulloch County Courthouse clock on a construction lift around midday Wednesday and fixed it into the round void during the afternoon.

The clock had stood idle, with one of its four cardinal-direction faces missing, for nine months. On April 5, 2022, the same evening that a powerful tornado caused much more severe damage and one death in Pembroke in Bryan County, wind from the wider storm system blew out the previous western dial of the Bulloch County clock.

Assisted on the ground and inside the clock tower by Bulloch County Correctional Institute inmates and some county employees, the Whitfield team on Wednesday first brought down, in pieces, the most recently broken acrylic plastic clock dial, as well as one whole and some partial, much heavier, painted wooden dials, apparently dating back to the clock’s original 1897 installation, which had been stored inside the clock tower.

“Oh no, it’s custom made,” sign company owner Josh Whitfield replied when asked if there had been any place to order an in-stock replacement dial. “It was made here at the shop.”

Whitfield Sign employees fashioned the new five-feet diameter, translucent acrylic dial and added dimensional lettering, in this case Roman numerals, that stand out a little from the base material but still match the other faces.

Historic challenge

“We’ve been in discussions ever since the storm took it out, trying to come up with a plan,” Whitfield said. “It’s a unique situation:  a lot of historical value, and mixing new construction and very old clock mechanisms and trying to put it all together.”

Some earlier talk of coordinating for the regular clock maintenance and repair contractor, from the Clockworks company in the Atlanta area, to be on the scene for the dial installation did not work out. Whitfield instead took directions from the Clockworks specialist and undertook the reassembly of the mechanism that moves the hands.

“We’ve been working on that and collaborating with them, and if we do our job, all they have to do is come in and calibrate it,” Whitfield said.

Before the end of the workday, his crew had reattached the hour, minute and second hands, and the west dial looked very much like the other three, except showing a different time. The clock, which county employees switched off last April to prevent further damage to the mechanism, remained motionless.

To restart soon

The county government’s Buildings and Facilities Manager David Campbell, who was inside the clock tower when interviewed by phone, said he expects the Clockworks specialist to come sometime next week to get the clock moving and telling time again.

The repairs, including the new dial as well as the installation and calibration, are expected to cost a little over $10,000 and will be covered by the county government’s property insurance, Campbell said in December.

After the current courthouse was built in 1894, an all-mechanical clock was purchased separately and installed more than two years later, and the clock first struck the hours on Feb. 25, 1897. Later during the 20th century an electric drive replaced the weight-drive mechanism, and the change to translucent dials allowed the clock to be lighted from inside.