Time and tide wait for no man. What can take you back in time? A machine like the one in the H.G. Wells story? An old familiar song? An old ticket stub? A program from a theatre performance? A photograph of a long lost loved one? Or could it be an actual time machine mechanism?

Several Years ago, we picked up our boat at the Port of Manistee on the western shore of Lake Michigan and began our vacation. Our slip was located at the municipal marina located on the Manistee River. We chose that location for starting our vacation because Manistee was the town where, among other things, tower clocks were once manufactured.

We had our boat delivered to the marina from its home port of Waukegan Illinois. By having the boat delivered to the opposite shore we could explore Michigan’s western coast immediately on our 4^th of July vacation, having already explored the Eastern coasts of northern Illinois and Wisconsin along Lake Michigan. We were on one of our first genealogical explorations. This expedition was a literal step back in time.

In 1800’s America not everyone had a timepiece. Pocket watches were an expensive luxury for many people. For many the only convenient way to know what time it was with any precision was to look for the time on the town clock, and Manistee was where many of those town clocks were built.

The town clock was most often situated on a steeple of a public building like a City Hall, County Hall, a train station, or a church, just as they are today. Because of their location on the towers of these buildings these large clocks were called tower clocks and their faces were viewable for blocks away. In Manistee the late 1800’s tower clocks were made in Nels Johnson’s workshop. He was the only tower clock maker in Manistee. We were hoping to locate his clock manufacturing workshop on our trip.

As we drove into Manistee we headed in the direction of the municipal marina. We were unfamiliar with the area so we overshot the marina and turned around in the parking lot of one of Manistee’s many old buildings. Thinking that this building would have made an excellent clock manufacturing workshop site we turned around and went back the opposite direction to the municipal marina. 

 It was our first confluence of coincidence in Manistee. It is said time is like a river, and here in Manistee the past met with the present, combining in a confluence time past and time present. We met with coincidence here again and again. Unknown to us at the time, we had just located the building that once housed Nels Johnson’s clock making workshop.

In his handwritten autobiography, Nels Johnson says that he was born November 26, 1838, in Denmark.^[1] According to his autobiography he arrived in Milwaukee Wisconsin 30 May 1863 at age 24 after a long voyage from Europe with less than 1 dollar to his name.^[2] He did not speak English. Having worked at a young age as an assistant to a blacksmith in Denmark, he took up working with metals in his new country. 

In Milwaukee Nels first worked as a smithy. After striking out on his own he worked as a machinist in his Milwaukee machine shops. Later he moved to Manistee and combined his interests in machining, physics and astronomy into his passion for clock building.^[3] It was in Manistee late in his career that he began his career as a tower clock manufacturer. He devoted his efforts full time to the manufacture of tower clocks starting in June 1895, when he was 57 years old. 

Manistee remembers many of its citizens from the old days. We visited the Manistee Historical Society located in an ancient building in downtown Manistee. The society keeps folders on many former Manistee citizens and they had several files stuffed with news clippings related to Nels Johnson, the tower clock manufacturing shop, and Johnson’s descendants, some of whom also created or worked with clocks and timepieces. 

The Historical Society had newspaper articles and photographs placing the exact location of the workshop. They also had clippings placing the Manistee locations of three of the tower clocks that Nels Johnson had built.  Three of the town’s churches had the clocks. The Historical Society also directed us to an exhibit in another location in town that had a display that included a telescope Nels had built as well as some other Nels Johnson related items.

We contacted one of the churches and asked if it was possible to view the clock’s mechanism inside its tower. The church  is a very large edifice, built of brick and from a time in Michigan’s history when the Midwest of the country was just beginning to grow into the network of large cities that we see today. The church arranged for us to visit the clock, guided by the clock’s caretaker. 

Located on Lake Michigan and in the heart of the massive forests of central northern Michigan, Manistee was well situated to be a major supplier of much the lumber required to build those cities. The construction of the church, its large interior, and its Tiffany stained glass windows, testify to the prosperity of the town and its church members in the 1800’s as well as the loving care taken with its preservation since that time.

The caretaker met us and guided us to the top of the church’s steeple where the mechanism is housed.  We expected to see a giant antique clockwork capable of turning the massive hands of the clock and we were not disappointed.  However instead of a massive clockwork of gears and cogs we saw a compact antique mechanism setting on a sturdy ironwork frame measuring about two by three foot and four feet long. 

The mechanism itself consists of brass and steel gearing connected to iron driveshafts that turn the hands of the clock. When the clock was first installed the gears were driven by a long hand cranked steel cable attached to a heavy counterweight that traveled through a deep shaft. That cable was rewound by hand. The descent of the counterweight as it traveled downward through the shaft turned the gears that moved the large hands of the clock. In a concession to modernity, the winding is now done by electric motor.

Nels Johnson installed all of his tower clocks himself, no small feat given their weight and the height and steepness of the towers they were installed in. The clock mechanism is enclosed in its own small room at the top of the steeple.  There is a signature board next to the clock mechanism that visitors may sign. I wondered if Nels was looking down that day when his great-great-granddaughter signed the visitor’s board as his clock ticked off the seconds.

There were many Nels Johnson clocks installed in towers in the United States and around the world, from Lansing Michigan’s City Hall to Traverse City, to Texas, to Chengtu China, to Lucknow India, to Silicon Valley in Mountain View California^[4]. A partial list of the tower clocks appears below. Many are still in place, keeping accurate time for well over the one hundred years that Nels predicted when he named the clocks Century Clocks. His family members have visited the Century Clocks still ticking in churches in the Midwest, in the County Courthouse in Denton County^[5] , and in the Grand Traverse Courthouse in Traverse City. One of his tower clocks graced the Michigan Building at the 1893 World’s Fair Columbian Exposition in Chicago. 

Ancient clocks, built by a grandfather. Time machines in the sense of chronometers, seen and used by thousands as they go about their daily activities, measuring their activities to the movements of the clock hands. Time machines also in the sense that they take us back to an earlier America, telling the story of one man, one family, one city, one state in a growing America in the late 1800’s. An America where a recent immigrant raised himself by his bootstraps from penniless to prosperity. Nels, self-educated in physics and astronomy, applied innate intellect, and experience derived from hard work, to create machines used as essential architectural adornments of a practical nature, tower clocks, on large buildings.

I mentioned a moment of prescience when we entered Manistee and turned our car at what was once the location of Nels’ clock factory. Our visit took place over the 4^th of July and we were treated to a large 4^thof July parade that passed in front of the municipal harbor. 

The parade featured the University of Michigan Alumni Marching Band. Dressed in various festive costumes they belted out patriotic music as they passed. The U of M band was closely followed by a boy scout troop playing fifes and other instruments. The song that that they played as they passed by was “My Grandfather’s Clock”.

Partial List of Purchasers of CENTURY TOWER CLOCKS^[6]

Comstock Bank Bldg., Big Rapids, MI

City Hall, Ludington, MI

Mason County Court House, Ludington, MI 

Court House, Cheboygan, WI 

Grand Traverse Court House, /Traverse City, MI 

Church, Gaylord, MI

Court House, Ithaca, MI

M.E. Church, Grand Rapids, MI

St. Joseph’s Church, Manistee, MI

Guardian Angels Church, Manistee, MI 

Congregational Church, Manistee, MI

T.C. Larsen; Wholesale & Retail Merchant, Manistee, MI 

two clocks Manistee County Savings Bank Bldg., Manistee, MI 

Manistee Brewing Co., Manistee, MI

Wm. Beverly, Merchant, Manistee, MI

A.O. Wheeler, Manistee, MI.

Canfield Tug Line, Manistee, MI

A.N, Johnson, Manistee, MI

P.T. Glassmire, Manistee, MI

M.E. Church, Manistee, MI

Ford St. Union Depot, Detroit, MI

United States Customs House, Detroit, MI

United States Customs House, Memphis, TN 

United States Customs House, San Jose, CA 

Times Mirror Bldg., Los Angeles, 

CA Church, Postville, IA

Church, Good Thunder, MN

Church, Pellican Rapids, MN

Court House, Fond du lac, WI

Church, Fond du Lac, WI

Church, Watertown, WI

Zions Church, Milwaukee, WI

Bethlehem Church, Milwaukee, WI

12th St. Lutheran Church, Milwaukee, WI 

Church, Philadelphia, PA

Church, Rochester, NY

Court House, Gatesville, TX

Court House, Denton, TX

World’s Fair Bldg., Chicago, IL (1893) 

M.E. Church, Battle Creek, MI

Isabella Tobarns College, Lucknow, India 

Hospital, Chengtu, West China

Court House, Pontiac, MI

Charles Shannabrook, Los Angeles, CA 

Xenia Court House, Xenia, OH

Church, Detroit, MI

Church, Grand Haven, MI

Court House, St. Joseph, MI

City Hall, Lansing, MI

Church, Michigan City, IN

Church, Arcadia, MI

Court House, Greensburg, IN

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^[1] Nels Johnson, Dana J Blackwell, editor., Nels Johnson and his Century Tower clocks, Nels Johnson, Clockmaker, 1838-1915,p. 160, Manistee Printing Co, 1894.

https://archive.org/details/nelsjohnsonclock00blac/page/n7/mode/2up?view=theater

^[2] Nels Johnson, Dana J Blackwell, editor., Nels Johnson and his Century Tower clocks, Nels Johnson, Clockmaker, 1838-1915,p. 167, Manistee Printing Co, 1894.

https://archive.org/details/nelsjohnsonclock00blac/page/n23/mode/2up?view=theater

^[3] Nels Johnson, Dana J Blackwell, editor., Nels Johnson and his Century Tower clocks, Nels Johnson, Clockmaker, 1838-1915,p. 167, Manistee Printing Co, 1894.

https://archive.org/details/nelsjohnsonclock00blac/page/n6/mode/1up?view=theater

^[4] San Jose Art Museum, http://sjclocktower.org/clock.html

^[5] Denton County Courthouse, https://dentoncountyhistoryandculture.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/the-courthouse-clock-tower-and-nels-johnson/

^[6] Nels Johnson, Dana J Blackwell, editor., Nels Johnson and his Century Tower clocks, Nels Johnson, Clockmaker, 1838-1915, Manistee Printing Co, 1894.  https://archive.org/details/nelsjohnsonclock00blac/page/n35/mode/2up

Bruce Wright, © 2024