The St. Johns courthouse clock that outlived its building

Look up at the cupola on the Clinton County courthouse in downtown St. Johns and you’re looking at a clock older than almost everything around it. The building under it was finished in 2000. The clockworks ticking inside it have been keeping county time since the 1870s.

The first courthouse went up here after taxpayers voted in 1869 to spend $25,000 on it — a big sum then — with the design borrowed from the courthouse over in Bay City. The cornerstone was laid that fall, and the place was done by January 1872. It had a rough start: on March 15, 1871, while still being built, the dome took a lightning strike that tore out the whole southeast corner and shattered every pane of glass. The county seat had only landed in St. Johns a dozen years before that, moving up from the older village of DeWitt in December 1857.

By the late 1990s the 1872 building had aged past saving, and the county decided to start over. But they didn’t throw out the good bones. When the new courthouse was dedicated on June 22, 2000, workers had already pulled the original clockworks and the original bell, refurbished them both, and set them up in the new cupola. The spiral staircase from the old building was saved too, and now it’s the way you climb from the mezzanine up into that cupola.

So the courthouse you see is barely old enough to vote, but it’s wearing its great-great-grandfather’s watch. The bell that rings over Clinton Avenue is the same one that rang for farmers coming to town in horse-drawn wagons, and the clock has been telling St. Johns what time it is for a century and a half, through two buildings and one very unlucky bolt of lightning.