Copyright postandcourier
CAMDEN — Although the city’s 19th-century clock tower is a downtown landmark, it has struggled for nearly a year to do one of the main things it’s meant to do. It couldn’t keep time. A few downtown business owners began to take notice, said Shawn Putnam, the top city planner in the fast-growing community of about 9,000. “The system that was in there was 50 to 60 years old, and it just wore out,” Putnam said of the clock, housed in the tower built around 1886 and once linked to a former opera house. Crews have spent the past few weeks on a roughly $35,000 project to fix the problem, which officials expect to wrap up within two months. It stemmed from worn-out gears in the mechanism that connected to and turned the clock’s hands. As a result, it chimed on the hour, but none of its four faces showed the correct time. With the maker of that mechanism no longer producing replacement parts, the city’s only option was to install a new system. That upgrade will automatically adjust for daylight saving time, eliminating the need for someone to climb the tower and reset the clock manually. It also offers more ringing options than the old system, which rang the number of times that matched the hour. The new system can replicate the sound of a swinging bell and ring on demand or during events such as funeral processions and other downtown gatherings. “A really good time (for a special ringing), if we would’ve had it back then, was earlier this year when we had the procession through town for 13 Americans who died during the Battle of Camden,” said Putnam, referring to the 1780 clash fought just outside the city, where British troops routed the Continental Army, leaving more than half the Americans dead or wounded. A local historic preservation group has partnered with genealogists to study the remains of the 13 soldiers, which were excavated in 2022.
