The Thomas R. Proctor Clock was put into operation on September 11, 1918 after being created by Gorham, a New York firm of jewelers and silversmiths, and it originally stood in the center of Route 20 at the intersection of Main, Church, and Lake Streets, where it served as an unusual traffic signal before being moved to its present location. Thomas Redfield Proctor, born May 25, 1844 in Proctorville, Vermont, gave the clock to the village. His great-grandfather, an Army officer in the Revolutionary War, founded that town. Proctor attended school in Boston, served as a Union naval officer in the Civil War, and was decorated for meritorious conduct by the Secretary of the Navy. After working as a hotel manager in Nyack, he came to Utica in 1869 and purchased Bagg's Hotel. He later married Maria Williams in 1891 and lived in the Williams mansion, now the nucleus of Utica's art center, the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute. Before his marriage, he bought the Spring House on village-owned Spring Park, established a summer home across Church Street, and operated the hotel until it was destroyed by fire in 1897. His gifts to the village also included the library, designed in the Prairie style pioneered by Frank Lloyd Wright and formally opened in January 1911, with a 1919 addition named the Proctor Memorial Room, built by Thomas and his brother Frederick to commemorate their sisters Dalusia and Lomy, whose portraits still hang there. His last gift to the village was John D. Cary Park, dedicated July 4, 1918, a 25-acre park on Prospect Hill whose centerpiece was a 32-ton boulder hauled from a few miles east of the village by horse-drawn sled over two winters. Proctor died in 1920, and residents remained mindful of his generosity.