The Jacobs Jewelers Clock: Jacksonville's 1901 Street Clock

Highlights

• Built in 1901 by the Seth Thomas Clock Company, one of 100 identical street clocks made for cities across the country
• Twelve of those 100 are left, and this is one of them
• It went up three months after the Great Fire of 1901, in front of a store that had just burned down
• Over fifteen feet tall, roughly two tons, and it cost $1,200 installed
• It stood on Bay Street until 1930, then moved to Laura and Adams
• A city bus hit it in the 1970s
• Jacobs Jewelers donated it to the city in the mid 1990s, closed for good in January 2023, and the clock is still keeping time

The Great Fire of 1901 took out almost all of downtown Jacksonville. Three months later, a jewelry store put a two-ton clock on the sidewalk in front of its rebuilt storefront. That timing tells you everything about what this thing was for.

You've walked past it. Corner of Laura and Adams, black and gold, four faces. Most people register it as street furniture and keep moving.

It has been in downtown Jacksonville longer than every building around it.

What is the Jacobs Jewelers clock?

The Jacobs Jewelers clock is an ornate four-dial street clock at Laura and Adams streets in downtown Jacksonville. The Seth Thomas Clock Company built it in 1901 as one of 100 identical clocks sold to cities nationwide. Twelve survive. It was installed for the jeweler Greenleaf & Crosby, later renamed Jacobs Jewelers, and now belongs to the city.

Three months after the fire

The fire hit on May 3, 1901 and burned through most of what we now call downtown. Greenleaf & Crosby lost their storefront with everything else.

Three months later, the City Council gave them permission to install the clock in front of their rebuilt store at 41 West Bay Street. So it went up while the rest of the block was still rubble and scaffolding. A fifteen-foot ornamental clock, in a burned city, three months out.

It reads as a flex. It probably was one. It also reads as a very expensive way of saying we're staying, which is the part that holds up.

One of a hundred

Seth Thomas, the Connecticut clockmaker, built 100 of these for cities around the country. Greenleaf & Crosby paid roughly $1,200 for theirs, installation included, and a contemporary account called it the handsomest of its kind in the South.

Twelve of the hundred are still standing. Ours is one.

That's the number worth sitting with. Eighty-eight of these went to the scrapyard, or got hit, or got quietly removed when somebody decided the sidewalk needed to be wider.

The move to Laura and Adams

Damon Greenleaf opened his jewelry store here in 1867, right after the Civil War. J.H. Crosby joined him in 1880. A quarter century after the fire, the company put up the twelve-story Greenleaf & Crosby Building at Laura and Adams, designed by Marsh & Saxelbye.

The clock stayed on Bay Street until 1930, when it was moved to the corner of Laura and Adams and installed in front of the new building. It has been on that corner ever since.

The company later became Jacobs Jewelers. The clock kept both names in practice, which is why you'll see it called the Greenleaf clock, the Jacobs clock, and the Greenleaf/Jacobs clock, all referring to the same object.

The bus

In the 1970s a car swerved into a southbound city bus on Laura Street. The driver put the bus up on the curb to avoid it and hit the clock.

Jacobs Jewelers paid to have it restored and put back. A plaque went up beside it in 1989 listing the people who worked on that restoration.

It got another refurbishment in the 2010s that added computerized internals, and the city reinstalled it in 2013. So the case is 1901 and the guts are not, which is how most things this old survive.

The store closed. The clock didn't.

Jacobs donated the clock to the city and its people in the mid 1990s. Good call, as it turned out.

On January 31, 2023, Jacobs Jewelers closed for good when the owners retired. Florida's oldest jewelry store, done.

The clock is city property, so it stayed. It's now a monument to a business that no longer exists, standing in front of a building named for a company that stopped using that name generations ago, on a corner most people cross without looking up.

Go look at it

Laura and Adams, downtown, in front of 208 N. Laura Street. Free, obviously. Takes four minutes.

Look at the four faces, then look at the plaque on the building beside it. Then consider that it was standing there before every single thing you can see from that spot.

We put the clock on a sticker, along with nineteen other Jacksonville landmarks, in our Jacksonville sticker pack. Twenty 3-inch waterproof vinyl stickers for $15. If you only want this one, the Jacobs Jewelers clock sticker is sold on its own. The rest of the landmarks are in our guide to the twenty locals actually point at.