Ephraim Niles Byram, born the son of a master carpenter, lived (and dropped out of school) and worked in Sag Harbor, at the far eastern tip of Long Island, where he became an astronomer, built an orrery in his early twenties, and made some of the most spectacularly accurate American tower clocks of the mid-nineteenth century.

George Milton Stevens was born into a rather wealthy family in Boston, Massachusetts, graduated from the prestigious English High School, and after early work as a bookkeeper, went into the tower clock business in competition with the likes of Edward Howard and Andrew Stephen Hotchkiss, and retired a rich man.

Byram’s known furthest-west venture was to Louisville, Kentucky, where he installed a clock valued at $2,000 in 1855.  Stevens ventured (whether in person or not isn’t known) as far west as Salt Lake City, Utah, where his catalog of clock installations claims a Stevens clock—date and place not otherwise noted nor confirmable.

In 1861, Brigham Young sent the Cotton Mission—309 families—to the St. George area of Utah to raise cotton during the Civil War. Cotton, sugar beets, and silk worms were raised in an effort toward self-sufficiency, since the war would soon prohibit imports from elsewhere. Cotton was then king, and the pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons, in the common terminology), would cash in their crop, since the South would soon fall under a Union blockade designed to keep the South from selling any of its cotton. The Mission was led by George A. Smith, after whom the town is named. Needless to say, the area prospered and soon became known as “Utah’s Dixie.” The St. George Tabernacle was completed in 1877, but the steeple was complete enough to have a tower clock installed in 1872. In the last years of his life, President Brigham Young lived just a few blocks from the St. George Tabernacle; his house still stands.

Ballard Gardner, an Orem, UT, resident and a lifelong clock enthusiast, was in St. George on business when he first noticed that the St. George Tabernacle clock was not running. He got permission to go up in the steeple and see the poor condition of the clock movement. He approached Richard Clark, the Tabernacle facilities manager, about the problems with the clock and Clark agreed the clock should be restored. “We decided that we wanted the clock to be what it is—a precision instrument,” Clark said. Clark obtained approval from the headquarters of the Church of Latter-day Saints. Ballard Gardner enlisted the help of his brother, Don Gardner, and Thom Hinckley, a longtime friend and fellow clockmaker. All three men had spent their lives developing the skills necessary to take on such a project.

The St. George Tabernacle Clock

Contrary to long-standing local legend, the St. George Tabernacle clock was not imported from England. The clock was made by Ephraim Niles Byram in Sag Harbor, Long Island, some time between 1850 and 1858. Positive identification of the Tabernacle clock as a Byram was made by Frederick M. Shelley, author of Early American Tower Clocks, who provided pictures of a Belvidere, New Jersey, clock for comparison, and this author, who considers this clock a rare example of this particular maker, and therefore very valuable.1

The photographs of the Byram clock in Belvidere illustrate an identical cast-iron posted frame. One of the features that clearly identifies the St. George clock as a Byram is the external dial-setting mechanism. On both the Belvidere and the St. George clocks, a large brass knob is loosened, the drive gear is disengaged from the square on the end of the arbor, the hands set, the drive gear replaced on its square, and the knob tightened down again. No other known tower clockmaker used this setting arrangement. The intermediate wheel has a minute chapter ring engraved on it, unique to surviving Byrams, and one of the first known attempts at engineering a setting dial for this maker’s clocks. The escapement configuration is identical to that on the Belvidere clock. There are only five other surviving Byram clocks, and of those, none are currently running. 

A thorough search has been made of LDS Church Archives. The stake and ward2 records are available only from 1880 onward, so there is no known historical documentation of the origin and installation of the clock. It had been hoped that documentary evidence would help solve the mystery of this clock. The early Byram clocks had finials on the corner posts of the movement. According to Shelley, Byram clocks from 1850 onward have decorative flat-top posts. Shelley also indicates that Byram built his last tower clock in 1858. This leaves 14 to 22 years unaccounted for between the manufacture of this clock movement and its installation in the Tabernacle.

The mystery is compounded by the discovery that the universal joints in the leading-off rods that drive the hands via the motion work, as well as the motion works themselves, were clearly made by George M. Stevens, the previously mentioned tower clockmaker, who was active between 1864 and 1909. The admittedly incomplete records3 indicate that Stevens installed a major clock in Salt Lake City, but the place and the date of this installation are unknown, and are, to date, untraceable. Perhaps if Stevens was in Salt Lake City installing a clock he sold to the church, he had taken a Byram clock in partial payment for the installation of one of his own clocks, and provided the missing parts mentioned above...

Suffice it to say that there’s a Byram clock with Stevens universal joints and motion works in St. George, Utah, and leave it at that. Wild-eyed speculation shouldn’t figure in clockwork archaeology, to borrow Mr. Shelley’s phrase.

But the question remains: How did a Sag Harbor, Long Island, Byram clock and Boston Stevens motion works end up in a small Utah desert town that even today boasts of no more than 22,000 inhabitants?

Before the Standard Time Act of 1917, those cities not using railroad time had to establish their own time based on when high noon occurred. For instance, high noon occured seven minutes later in St. George than in Salt Lake City. A jeweler’s regulator or his street clock, and failing those, a tower clock, was essential to indicate standard time for a nineteenth-century town.

Prior to the invention of clocks, everyone had used sundial time (the origins of the sundial have disappeared in antiquity), which introduces inaccuracies due to the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit; therefore, it is different from clock time. A sundial is 14 minutes slow in January and 16 minutes fast in November. By the nineteenth century, uniform clock time was very desirable. When high noon was used to set a clock, the equation of time had to be applied to provide the appropriate correction to sun time. Now that we have inexpensive watches and clocks that are corrected hourly by radio signal from the National Institute of Standards and Technology, mechanical clock accuracy is no longer as important as it once was, but for the last five centuries, it was a major scientific thrust. That Byram’s 1838 and 1845 clocks were achieving an accuracy of four-tenths of a second a day is incredible. By the end of his clock building career, he had improved that to 0.33 seconds a day—one of his clock models was guaranteed not to vary more than two minutes in 12 months.

The Tabernacle clock ran reliably as a pendulum-regulated clock for nearly 80 years. The pendulum is 14-feet long and beats once every two seconds. It is the pendulum (if we ignore escapement error, sol-lunar tidal effects, and a myriad of other possible interferences) that determines the accuracy of the clock. By the late 1940s, the clock had ticked an estimated one-and-a-quarter billion times, and wear on the escapement and other critical parts made it nearly impossible to keep the clock running. In the early 1950s through the 1960s, attempts were made to drive the time train with an electric motor, but these attempts were only successful in damaging the clock movement. Other attempts were made through the years without success. When the team saw the clock for the first time, the clock was covered with brass swarf, which the electric motor had chewed off the wheels.

What Was Done to Rebuild the Clock

When we first saw the clock, none of the four faces told the same time. The original hands had never been properly counterbalanced and the minute hands (the minute hand counter weight was on the hour hand and vice versa) would fall over to about five minutes past the hour when the hands passed twelve, and lose about five minutes when the minute hand started up from the half-hour position. New lightweight hands were laser-cut out of aluminum. New counterbalance weights were made and each hand perfectly balanced. The hands were then powder coated in the shop of Dan McArthur, Mayor of St. George. The motion works that drive the hands were cleaned and rebuilt. The distribution transmission that drives the dial motion works was rebuilt and re-mounted on a quarter-inch steel plate above the clock. All of the leading-off rods were replaced. All of the worn universal joints were rebuilt. The cumulative effect of all the wear in the drive train that had made it impossible to have all four dials indicate the same time was eliminated.

Ben Pratt, of Pratt Machine Works in Cove Fort, Utah, cast a brass blank from which he machined a new five-inch escape wheel with 30 teeth. He cut new verge pallets to a precise radius so they would be truly deadbeat. The original half-deadbeat pallets had been modified beyond repair. It was decided to make the new pallets adjustable to discourage alteration of the pallet faces. Thom Hinckley did the design work for the escape wheel, verge, and pallets. It required a lot of geometry and trigonometry (including the construction of a depthing tool capable of handling these oversize escapement parts) to verify the precise angles, shapes, and spacing so critical to the fine tolerances required for the clock to run accurately.

All clock bearings were repaired or replaced. The strike snail was refaced to match the strike rack. At some point in the past, the rack tooth spacing had been modified, the result being a clock that would strike once too many or too few times during the course of the day. The verge bearing bracket was lost when the electric motor was mounted. It was difficult to re-establish the original configuration, which was necessary to reconnect the pendulum to the clock movement.

The clock had been driven by heavy weights that were made onsite. When air conditioning was installed in the Tabernacle, it interfered with the fall of the weights, the consequence of which was a strike weight that had to be re-wound every three days. Considering the arduous 70-foot plus climb up the stairs and ladders leading up the tower to the clock movement, this was a deterrent to keeping the clock running. Part of the rebuild was to engineer, design, fabricate, and install endless chain rewinding systems for the strike and time trains. This system was designed and built by Ballard and Don Gardner, along with many of the other parts for the clock. These endless weight-driven chains drive the second wheel in each train. This mechanism preserves the historical integrity of the clock; that is, it could be returned to its original weight-driven configuration.

This is the first time since the late 1940s that the clock has run as a weight-driven, pendulum-regulated movement. The three men found and corrected the many problems that plagued this clock; many of which were created in the last 60 years. One major problem was the badly damaged suspension spring that supports the 14-foot pendulum. A new one was fabricated and installed.

The bell upon which the clock strikes was cast by the Meneely & Kimberly Foundry in Troy, NY, in 1871. The date is cast into the bell yoke. The frame supporting the 900-pound bell was stabilized and the 40-pound bell hammer mounting was rebuilt.

The movement had to be dismantled, removed piece-by-piece from the clock tower to the shop, where repairs were carried out and then rebuilt. When the work was done, the 400-pound clock was returned to the steeple, piece-by-piece, up the long stairs and vertical ladders to the clock room, where it was reassembled. The reconstruction was exceptionally difficult because of the many alterations made to the movement over the years. Finding these changes and correcting them was often a struggle of trial and error. Reconstructing any 150-year-old mechanism to anything resembling its original state is difficult and very time-consuming.

The Clock and Bell

Few people had clocks when construction started on the Tabernacle in 1863. “Timepieces were both a luxury and a rarity then,” said Elder Charles Rasmussen. There was a real need for a public clock, one that could be seen and heard, striking the hours on a bell. It was difficult for most residents to know what time of day it was—when church, community, and school meetings should start. There were some disagreements about when water turns for irrigation should start and end. Generally, they had to depend on “sun time” and the use of a sun dial to obtain any degree of accuracy.

The clock and bell were installed in the Tabernacle in 1872 before the completion of the interior of the building in 1876. With the completion of the installation, the community felt a sense of pride and prestige. At last they knew what time of day it was by looking at the clock faces or hearing the clock strike. Those few people who had timepieces could set them by the Tabernacle clock. It gave everyone a standard of time—in other words, it became everyone’s pocket watch.

Besides striking the hours, the ringing of the bell played an important role in the community. It was rung on special occasions. It announced Brigham Young’s arrival, sounded the passing of local pioneers, and made known the deaths of presidents of the Church and of the Nation. On January 6, 1896, it was tolled for two hours and forty minutes to proclaim that Utah had become a state. It tolled for a long period of time at the death of President Brigham Young, who in his later years maintained a home close to the St. George Tabernacle.

For many years the hands on the clock remained motionless and the sound of the bell was stilled. The people of St. George have missed the ringing of the bell and watching the time on the clock, and are delighted that the clock is once more working and the bell strike counts the hours.

Ballard Gardner said, “Our driving goal was to restore it to its original condition, to get it running again as a weight-driven pendulum clock, and to have the bell striking the hours.” It took hundreds of hours and many 250-odd mile trips to St. George for the skills and talents of these three men to successfully complete the restoration.

And yet the question still remains—how did a Byram clock from Long Island and Stevens motion works from Boston end up in a small Utah desert town?

About the Author

Donn Haven Lathrop retired from the U.S. Navy as a Training Devicesman Chief Petty Officer. An electronics specialist, he taught and worked with electronics, and electro/hydraulic systems applied to helicopter flight and weapons systems simulators, including the very first digital computer-driven helicopter simulator, and later wrote specifications for the procurement of state-of-the-art helicopter simulators.

Donn is the author of numerous articles for the Bulletin. His primary interest is in the history of clocks and their makers, with a particular emphasis on the New England states.

Notes:

1. Of the 15 clocks Byram is known to have made, there remain but six—some of these six are just the clock frame, or have been stripped and electrified. Of these six, the St. George clock is the only one currently running.
2. A stake may be considered analogous to a diocese in the Anglican, Greek Orthodox, or Roman Catholic churches. A ward is analogous to a parish within one of these dioceses.
3. See Frederick M. Shelley, “George M. Stevens and Co. Tower Clocks,” NAWCC Bulletin, No. 289 (April 1994): p. 140.