Changing to daylight savings time on courthouse clock 'a tough climb'
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Springing forward to daylight savings time can be a real challenge when you’re dealing with a historic courthouse clock.
It isn’t simply the four faces and the complicated antique mechanism but the climb—initially, on an old staircase with narrow treads and then on several ladders to get to the clock tower in Georgia’s historic Gwinnett County Courthouse, the Gwinnett Daily Post reports.
“It’s a tough climb,” courthouse program manager Renee Arant told the newspaper.
At best, the job can take an hour, and at worst there’s no telling how long the process will be, Chuck White told the newspaper on Friday as he and his son made the climb to do preliminary work in preparation for Sunday’s time change.
“It’s one of the few left in the state that’s an old Seth Thomas Clock from 1908 and still run by pendulum—nothing has been electrified,” said White, who is the owner of White’s Clock and Carillon in Sharpsburg.
Although the clock should now be showing the correct hour, it is routinely off by at least a few minutes, he noted, which is not unusual for a piece of courthouse history.
“These clocks, years and years ago, in county courthouses, they would have had a room where a guy would stay there and he would take care of the clock,” White said. “It’s just something that needs weekly maintenance. … It’s like a grandfather clock. The pendulum, you can turn, but that function is 100 years old so it’s not working that good.”
