It is the highest point in Boyertown and has been a silent sentinel for almost five years. But soon the clock and bell at Good Shepherd UCC Church will work again.
The project is the result of several years of planning by the Boyertown-based Save Our Boyertown Town Clock Foundation.
At the beginning of May, the repair work started with the disassembly of the clock. Bob Desrochers, watch and clock maker from Lititz, has been tasked with the job of repairing/redoing the 7-foot diameter clock.
“The original clock was in poor condition,” he said. “We would have liked to use the original movement but many of the original parts were missing and the plates damaged from previous modifications,” he noted.
Because of its location, at the top of the 125-foot tower with limited access, the clock didn’t get the necessary maintenance. Over the years it was modified when the gas lights were replaced with electric lighting. The weather and rain caused rust damage to the dial and some hands on the four-sided clock were missing.
The dial and its white acrylic background are each composed of six pieces.
Because of the clock’s deteriorated condition, the Clock Foundation board decided to modernize. The new clock will be accurate to within four seconds per year and because it will be computerized, it will adjust itself to the correct time after any power outage. “It will be minimal maintenance,” Desrochers says. It will be run by a low-voltage system that has a controller which will also adjust the clock for standard time and daylight savings time.
Desrochers said the clock and bell will be integrated. The clock and hammer will be activated by a controller synchronized by the time of the clock. It will strike the hours and half hour with the original hammer and will toll (ring using the clapper as the bell rotates back and forth). It can also be rung by hand with a rope as it once did.
The bell, which stayed in place during the renovations, only required the clapper and hammer to be repaired, according to the board chairman, Glenn Werstler. The supporting pieces were sandblasted and painted.
Werstler said the tower was heightened and the clock was first used in 1920. In a 2007 inspection, an engineer noted that the tower appeared to need work. One set of hands was damaged in a storm soon after that, so the set of the north face was removed to be used as a template for new sets of hands. When the bell stopped ringing in 2014, the Save Our Boyertown Town Clock Foundation was formed to save the clock and tower. He notes the board is comprised of members from Good Shepherd church and the Boyertown community. “We’ve had a lot of support from the church and community,” he said.
The project has been divided into three phases – repairing the clock and bell, reinforcing the tower, and repointing the brick, Werstler said. The board opted to work on the clock, bell, and structural components this year and repoint the brick next year.
Tom DiGuiseppe, of DiGuiseppe Construction from Bechtelsville, worked to repair the tower’s structural components. “The framework under the bell was in bad shape, the floor sagged from years of the bell’s weight. I expected the worst because of its age and it was exposed to the weather for years, finding a need to replace all the joists and flooring” he said.
“Most of the rest of the tower was in good shape,” he added.
He started by first placing a beam at the bottom of the top floor, where the clock is located, to suspend the bell. Then he removed and rebuilt the floor under the bell. Ideally, he would have brought in a crane to life and remove the bell. But because of the tight work area, he opted to keep the bell in place.
The logistics of working in the tight spaces, having to climb 56 steps and then three separate ladders to reach the roof at 100 feet, using a lift to bring supplies up and down, as well as fighting the rainy weather were some of the challenges of the job, DiGuiseppe said.
He also repaired the roof drainage. “There are flat roofs on the church with a central drain. The old system worked for all but one area,” he said. The other issue is the openness of the tower. DiGuiseppe placed piping on the interior to get any rain that came in, out of the tower.
He said that while the brick repointing is the last phase and will be done next year, the tower is structurally sound.
Werstler said that when the clock returns to the tower and the repair work to the bell is completed, the Foundation will have some type of celebration commemorating the occasion.