Northeast Harbor Library to get historic school clock

MOUNT DESERT – “Blow the dust off the clock. Your watches are behind the times. Throw open the heavy curtains which are so dear to you – you do not even suspect that the day has already dawned outside.”

Some might suggest that Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn may as well have been writing about the former Northeast Harbor Library building when he penned those words in 1969. People who advocated three years ago for replacing the now-demolished building said that though it was much loved, it was outdated, structurally unsound, and lacked sufficient space for its collection.

Still, others might point out that the quote could be taken quite literally in the new library when it opens later this year.

That’s because when the new building opens to the public, a large wall clock will be a new part of the library’s collection.

Actually, it’s a pretty old clock that may be new to the library but is not new to the town. For years it was mounted in the main hallway of Gilman High School, which used to stand across Summit Street from where the new library is being built.

“It might be one of the last things around from the old high school,” Bangor resident Lowell Chase said Monday. “My mother was late to school four days a week by that clock.”

Chase, who grew up in the local village of Northeast Harbor, and his sister, local Selectman Kathleen Branch, inherited the clock when their mother, Valerie Tracy, died last fall. Tracy was the former local postmaster and a 1949 graduate of Gilman High School.

Chase and Branch, with the town’s approval, have decided to give the clock to the library.

“That’s where my sister and I want it to go because we want people to see it,” Chase said.

Despite the implication of the quote, the clock did not appear to need dusting on Monday. Kenneth Taylor, Tracy’s companion later in life, loved clocks and saved the timepiece when the school was closed and then demolished in the 1950s. Though not necessarily striking in appearance to the average observer, Taylor valued the clock and took good care of it, Chase said.

It now sits mounted on the wall at the end of the hall in the Tracy Road home Tracy and Taylor shared before Taylor died in 1990. Chase, who works at Eastern Maine Medical Center in Bangor, and his wife come down to Northeast Harbor once a week to check in on old friends and to make sure the house, and clock, are in good working order.

According to Chase, expert clockmaker Alexander Phillips of Bar Harbor estimates the clock was made around 1860.

“He had close to 100 clocks,” Chase said of Taylor. “If he hadn’t grabbed it, it probably would have ended up in a pile of rubble. It’s not worth a lot. It’s just a wall clock, but it’s in very good shape.”

Robert Pyle, director of Northeast Harbor Library, said Monday that the library has a history of preserving items of interest from the local community.

“We started collecting archives in 1892, when the [library] started up,” Pyle said, sitting behind his desk in the library’s temporary offices on Tracy Road. “There are a lot of things in the collection that were old when Gilman [High School] was in operation.”

Most of the library’s artifacts, which number more than 8,000, are kept in permanent storage, Pyle said. The library has more than 3,000 photographs and more than 200 maps in its collection, as well as paintings and other items.

The new 14,000-square-foot library building, which will be roughly double the size of its predecessor, is expected to open sometime this fall, according to Pyle. With 42,000 books in its collection, the new building should have enough room for the library for at least the next 15 years, he said.

“We’re really quite enthusiastic about it,” Pyle said of the library becoming the clock’s new owner. “We consider ourselves a repository of the character of the community.”