Time Traveling Through Newtown’s Landmark Clocks

By John Voket

Christopher Locke is a very busy guy, traversing the state in his job as a telecommunications engineer for AT&T. But he has become increasingly busy lately, finding time whenever possible to assist the town with several high profile clock projects.

As recently as last Sunday, when many folks may have been sleeping through morning plans because of the change to Daylight Saving Time, Mr Locke was moving efficiently through Edmond Town Hall ensuring all the clocks in that public building were springing forward.

“All of the town hall wall clocks should move forward in sync with the master clock, but since most of those ten mechanisms are over 80 years old, I’ll have to check each of them and advance them manually if they don’t match up,” Mr Locke told The Bee last week, before the annual springtime change went into effect.

This is by no means the first experience this local craftsman has had with timepieces in the town hall, or in other municipal buildings. Mr Locke, along with former Newtown resident Jerry Valenta, not only meticulously cleaned and restored all the Edmond Town Hall clocks over the past few years, but the pair also performed a similar job on the Newtown Hall tower clock at Fairfield Hills.

While Mr Valenta, and his wife, Kaaren, The Newtown Bee’s former associate editor, recently relocated to Florida, Mr Locke keeps in touch via phone and email. Since acquiring this relatively new hobby, the electrical engineer has had opportunities to discover and visit numerous vintage clocks, which he sometimes chooses to do as an alternative during his lunch breaks.

“I’ve had a chance to go up into the Waterbury clock tower at the railroad station, and just a couple of weeks ago I got to see a beautifully restored E. Howard clock which was originally installed in the Windham Town Hall in 1894,” Mr Locke said. “There are so few people today that can really appreciate a vintage clock, that when I come across one, I usually ask to see it, and most of the time, folks are happy to let me.”

Hands Helping Hands

As he talked about his timeless hobby and his volunteer work in town, the engineer who is used to working with complicated computer systems, patiently polished a brass sidearm accessory to a Seth Thomas banjo clock he is restoring. Hunched over his workbench, Mr Locke conjured up a vision of Seth Thomas himself, who may have performed a similar chore nearly two centuries ago when the famous Connecticut Yankee first established his clock making business in the Town of Wolcott before relocating to an adjacent community renamed Thomaston in his honor.

“This is a Brookfield banjo clock,” Mr Locke explained. “It was one of a dozen different banjo models Seth Thomas produced over the years.” Besides repairing a cracked suspension spring, the Newtown resident took pride in performing a complete cleaning of the entire timepiece.

It was through his efforts to restore the Edmond Town Hall clock system that Mr Locke and Mr Valenta first discovered the wondrous mechanism in Newtown Hall.

“Jerry Valenta first contacted me back in 1998 when he was looking for help replacing or restoring the battery system for the clocks in town hall,” he said. “At the time they were all in a pretty bad state of disrepair.”

Since the Edmond Town Hall was constructed about the same time as some of the first buildings at Fairfield Hills, the pair thought they might find some parts to scavenge once the town took ownership of the facility two summers ago. While they found the state hospital’s central clock was part of an incompatible IBM system, they found the tower clock at Newtown Hall was a vintage 1931 Seth Thomas piece.

“Since the Seth Thomas Company destroyed much of its archives since the tower clock was built, we really had to do some comprehensive research to learn more about it,” Mr Locke said. “There was very little information, so most of our research was done in old catalogs.”

They discovered the original model, simply identified as a #4 tower clock, in an old catalog priced at a “very expensive” $850. It was the smallest of four tower clocks available from the local manufacturer at the time.

The Salvage Mission

The tower clock had not operated for more than two decades when Mr Locke and Mr Valenta managed to remove it from Fairfield Hills. It was caked with bird droppings, and workmen at the facility had rigged temporary fixes to the mechanism over the years with little regard for protecting its historic value.

“To say the least, it had been substantially modified, which was probably why it stopped working in the first place,” Mr Locke observed. “There was lots of stuff missing.”

The pair thought to contact the maintenance shop at Southbury Training School, because that facility also had several tower clocks installed around the same time. And to their credit, they discovered a well-maintained #6 Seth Thomas clock, a virtual copy of the piece here in Newtown, albeit larger.

“We took a bunch of photos of the number 6, then we used them to guide us in the restoration of our clock,” Mr Locke said. “Jerry restored and cleaned all those dirty, rusty gears and I helped refabricate or find alternatives to all the parts that were missing.”

Mr Locke also rebuilt the toaster-sized electrical power plant using other vintage items he had gathered over time.

Besides the personal satisfaction of helping to restore a piece of Newtown history, the Sandy Hook engineer also appreciates the stories he hears in the process, which makes the chores even more interesting.

“A resident related a story that one day as Fairfield Hills employees looked up at the clocks, all the hands were spinning round and round,” Mr Locke related. “With all the talk of the campus being haunted, employees were left spooked.

“What really happened was that the works were just out of order,” he said. “They just hadn’t been used in about 20 years, and we were trying to establish the baseline condition of the system so we could start the restoration process for the entire system, similar to what we did at the Edmond Town Hall. I operated several relays to observe the slave clock located on the wall above the master. The slave clock in the basement moved, as did all the other slave movements in the other buildings.”

So it was apparently Mr Locke and Mr Valenta who were the “ghosts,” finally taking the blame and laying to rest the mystery behind those spooky activities at Fairfield Hills that day.