MIDCOAST – Two Waldo County church restoration projects wrapped up this week. In Belfast, the antique machinery of the First Church UCC clock tower was replaced with modern electronic works, and in Stockton Springs a rebuilt spire was set atop the Stockton Springs Community Church completing the reconstruction of the town’s landmark steeple.

Before it was taken out of commission earlier this year, tower clock at First Church in Belfast was believed to be the fourth-oldest of its kind in Maine. The works were built at a machine shop at Head of the Tide in 1836, reportedly at the behest of Belfast city officials, who reasoned it would be cheaper than buying one established clock making company.

In modern times, it held the distinction of being the only church clock known to have been built in Maine. It was also famously unreliable. 

The clock needed regular adjustments and in recent years ran fast — about five minutes per week, according to Bob Stover, who maintained and wound the clock by hand weekly for over a decade.

The clock has always belonged to the City of Belfast, despite being located in the church steeple. At Stover’s urging, city officials opted to replace the old guts with modern, electrical works. Earlier this year, the old wooden hands that had warped enough over the years to occasionally catch hold of one another were removed.

Winterport-based clock servicers Peter and Susan Rioux installed new, aluminum replicas of the original hands last week. Behind each clock face, they added an electrically-powered timekeepinger to replace the old mechanical works, which had previously powered all of the hands with a set of axles radiating in four directions from the printing press-sized machine in the center of the tower to each clock face.

The new shoebox-sized metal housings aren’t much to look at, but they have all the features you might expect from a contemporary timepiece, including a GPS calibration and the ability to program the timing and sequence of chimes on the church’s old Revere bell.

As part of the modernization the Riouxs added a new electromagnetic striker for the bell. They also disassembled, cleaned and reassembled the old clockworks, which city officials have expressed an interest in displaying. As of last week Peter Rioux said there was no specific plan to remove the old clockworks in the tower.

There’s the steeple!

Stockton Springs lost a local landmark in 2008 when the steeple at the Stockton Springs Community Church was removed due to rot. The had been visible from Route 1 and could be seen well enough from the bay that it appeared on nautical charts produced by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Over the years, the church had been used for everything from traditional services and weddings to school graduation ceremonies.

On Friday, steeplewright Bob Hanscom climbed down a maze of of steps and ladders threading through the steeple he built over the past two years. That morning the last of five sections, the spire, had been lifted into place. By 11 a.m. All that remained was to connect the heavy copper wire running down from the lightning rod to the grounding wire coming up from the church below. Outside, tiny white wisps passed above the spire, but there wasn’t a proper cloud in the sky. Hanscom left the job for after lunch.