Unitarian to finish restoration with new clock face
BY PETER B. BRACE
Time will stand still on Orange Street Nov. 5-17 when the Unitarian Universalist Church's clock face is removed for replacement of its dials and regilding of it hands.

In 1995 the existing aluminum hands replaced the wooden ones that were installed in 1881. The dial, which was originally tin, is currently tongue-and-groove wood and some plywood that is rotting from the inside of the clock outwards.

Renovation of the South Church, as it is sometimes called, is entering its final phase with the manufacturing of four new clock faces and the revamping of its hands, capping off a four-year project funded by the Community Preservation Committee and the Worthington Foundation.

"The faces are rotting away. The wooden faces and the hands and the markers have to be regilded - if you look at it, it has all melted away," said Libby Oldham, an emeritus member of the South Church Preservation Fund Board of Directors and the leader of the project.

In 1995 the existing aluminum hands replaced the wooden ones that were installed in 1881. The dial, which was originally tin, is currently tongueand groove wood and some plywood that is rotting from the inside of the clock outwards.

Originally built in 1809 as the Second Congregational Meeting House Society Church, it was built by Elisha Ramsdell and Jemel West, Jr. for $8,533.36, according to the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) in the Library of Congress.

Captain Thomas Cary brought the church's first bell from Lisbon, Portugal in 1812. It was placed in the tower in December 1815. The HABS for this church states that Boston merchant Josiah Bradlee donated the original clock for the tower and that it was replaced in 1823 with a brass clock with four dials that Nantucketers Samuel Jenks Jr., James Winslow and Edward Field built on Main Street.

That clock counted island time until an E. Howard & Co. clock took over in 1881 when William Hadwen Starbuck donated it to the town. The HABS said this clock ran on weights until it was electrified in 1957.

Les Ottinger, president of the South Church Preservation Fund Board of Directors, said that staging and a crane is going to be used by Americlock of St. Louis, Mo. to allow its clock restoration expert, Alan Androuais to work on the South Street Church's giant timepiece. Americlock, according to Oldham, restored the original 1818 town clock that is in the whaling museum.

"They're going to remove the deteriorated wooden dials and replace them with sheet aluminum dials," Ottinger said. "These dials will have new numerals and markings. They're patterned after the earliest pictures we have."

Prior to this last part of the restoration project that began in 2002, the church replaced the clock itself and added an automatic bell ringer. In 2004, the cradle that suspends the bell in place was restored so the bell could be rung again. Last fall, the dome of the church was regilded.

This final aspect of the project is being funded by a grant of $69,000 from the Community Preservation Committee. The entire, four-year effort, estimated Ottinger, will cost $150,000, which the church is getting from the CPC and the Worthington Foundation.

While the work is being done, the clock will tick but will not tell time and its bells will be silent, said Oldham.

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