County Magazine

Gene Galbraith didn’t learn how to restore clocks until he was in his 50s, but he’s always been keeping time.

The son of a master builder who conducted the church choir and a piano-playing mom, Galbraith, now 89, grew up in Austin and studied music at the University of Texas before becoming a choral conductor and high school music teacher. He led countless performances in Texas — including 15 performances for Handel’s “Messiah” with a choir backed by the Austin Symphony — and took several choir trips to Europe before retiring in the early 1990s to run an antique store with his wife, Luella.

That’s where he saw lots of old clocks come in. “But nobody wanted to buy them if they didn’t work,” he said. He reached out to a local clock repairman and started a five-year apprenticeship in horology, the study of time and the art of building and maintaining clocks and watches. He befriended another horologist in Austin named Bob Larson, who owned the Old Timer Clock Shop, and that’s how he first started getting paid to fix those clocks frozen in time.

But those clocks were about to get a whole lot bigger. In 2005, Caldwell County reached out to Galbraith because the courthouse clock had been vandalized. He’d never worked on a clock of that size, and it turned out that theirs was too badly damaged to be repaired. But he found a 1917 mechanical clock that he restored that still keeps time in the square over Lockhart.

In a tick of fate, two years later, with the help of a $500 check from Larson, Galbraith opened the Southwest Museum of Clocks and Watches in Lockhart, which continues to draw clock enthusiasts from across the country to the Caldwell County square where his courthouse work began.
 

Galbraith’s county courthouse work really took off in 2010, when he made a presentation at a Texas Association of Counties conference about the importance of the Texas Historical Commission’s Courthouse Preservation Program. Since then, he has received more inquiries about clock tower restoration work than he can keep up with. Galbraith and his assistants have restored 10 courthouse clocks, including those in Caldwell, Cooke, Fort Bend, Franklin, Llano, Williamson and Hood counties.

The clocks are disassembled in the towers and then relocated to the museum in Lockhart or to Galbraith’s personal workshop in Austin. That’s where the clocks are restored and used to teach apprentices who now come to learn horology from Galbraith.

Earlier this year, Galbraith and his team received the 11th courthouse clock to restore, a 1-ton 1884 E. Howard clock that they had to lower 95 feet from the top of the Bastrop County Courthouse. “That’s when you hope you don’t drop a bucket full of parts,” Galbraith said. “You have to have a steady hand and good judgment to do this work,” not to mention quite a bit of patience. Some of the restoration projects take six months to complete.

Of the 254 counties in Texas, about 55 have clock towers, and these clocks have long played a critical role in the lives of Texans who needed a shared clock to set their watches to, said Susan Tietz, program coordinator for the Texas Historical Commission’s Courthouse Preservation Program, who has worked with Galbraith on clock restorations. 

Tietz has been with the program since 2002, helping to distribute more than $300 million in funding for the renovation program, including $45 million from the most recent state legislative session. Counties must match the funding, which sometimes prevents them from taking on total restorations, but a single project — like restoring a clock — can be a more doable project, Tietz said.

“Courthouses are the heart of historic downtown communities, especially in rural areas,” Tietz said. “If the heart isn’t pumping blood and thriving, the whole downtown sags. As soon as that heart is restored, it brings a lot of life back.” She’s seen downtowns go from ghost towns to thriving tourist destinations after a courthouse restoration.

This fall, Galbraith and his team will start the restoration of the Wise County Courthouse clock in Decatur.

“Time is of the essence, and it is in my best interest to train upcoming people who have the intellect and the trust to do it,” Galbraith said as he reflected on his years working to help people move through the hours, minutes and seconds of their days. “The older you get, your vision becomes more clear about the perspective of the past and the hope for the future.”

He has two teenage apprentices who give him hope for the future of clock restoration. “That gives me confidence that [this craft] will perpetuate itself long after I’m gone.”