Spartanburg Town Clock

First installed near the center of Spartanburg in January 1881, the Old Town Clock became a symbol of the city’s heartbeat and change. After Spartanburg, founded in 1831, received its revised charter as a city in late 1880 with 3,253 inhabitants, the town council purchased the Seth Thomas clock on December 2 for the new opera house completed that year during the administration of intendent L.P. Walker. The building on West Main Street, at the site of the present masonic temple, served largely as a town hall, with town offices, the guardhouse, and post office on the ground floor and a 700-seat opera house above for public gatherings and entertainment. The clock stood at the peak of the tower above the bell, which struck the hours and also sounded fire alarms by code. For Spartans in the 1880s, the clock and bell marked a town expanding rapidly as an important railroad center; after the third railroad reached Spartanburg in 1886, the population grew 70 percent to 5,554 by 1890. Purchased for $966.02 plus a $43.98 freight charge, the clock was originally regulated by Washington Time, allowing 19 minutes and 32 seconds for the difference from 75 degrees west longitude. Its pendulum weighed 125 pounds, another weight 125 pounds, and the strike weight 800 pounds; the largest wheel measured sixteen inches in diameter, and the 1,200-pound bell could be heard across the town’s one-mile radius from the courthouse. The Seth Thomas Clock Company, established in 1813, contracted with M.D. Bradley to install the clock in the steeple. In the same month that the clock and bell were installed, the Merchant’s Hotel opened beside the public square, and three months later the Morgan Monument was unveiled in what became Morgan Square; nearby stood the third county courthouse, built in 1856 at Main and Magnolia Streets, while a fourth courthouse was occupied in 1892. When the town council sold the city hall and opera house in October 1906 for $12,123 and the building was demolished in 1907, the clock and bell were moved to the courthouse tower, where the bell was placed above the clock. There they continued in service until that courthouse was torn down in 1958, after which the clock was stored and the bell fell silent for twenty years. In the 1970s, the Spartanburg Bicentennial Committee began efforts to restore the clock and bell to a central location, and in the spring of 1979, with support from citizens, federal community development grant assistance, the city, Joe Griffin and Griffin Machine Works, and donations from Spartanburg school children, they resumed service to the people of Spartanburg.

Spartanburg, South Carolina · United States