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Clock Tower Renovations Begin at Mississippi College


MC Clock Tower repairs and other work at Nelson Hall should be completed by Dec. 1.

A lighting strike over the summer damaged Mississippi College’s Clock Tower atop Nelson Hall.

In late October, construction crews began work to repair the 30-foot-tall Clock Tower, one of the Christian university’s iconic structures. The project at the 190-year-old institution should be finished by December 1, MC officials say.

At the time of the lightning strike, 600 teens from Baptist churches statewide were attending a summer camp worship service in Swor Auditorium, on the first floor in Nelson Hall. There were no injuries.

During the heavy thunderstorms in Central Mississippi on July 14, power was knocked out on portions of the Clinton campus. That power outage silenced the Christian Band on the Swor Auditorium stage. But the students at the Baptist-affiliated university for Super Summer camps continued to sing “How Great Thou Art.”

The Clock Tower was constructed in 1947 along with the rest of the three-story MC administration building.

The lightning strike reminded Mississippians of the 1985 hit movie “Back to the Future,” starring Michael J. Fox as the character Marty McFly. In the film, lightning struck a prominent building’s clock tower in the middle of a small town.

The Mississippi College building lightning strike damaged the brick structure and several of the Clock Tower’s cap stones. The clock tower was frozen in time to 9:15 p.m. that evening in mid-July. There was damage to the speakers that supports the campus carillon, said Steve Stanford, vice president for administration and government affairs.

The work on the Clock Tower and Nelson Hall began October 17, or two days after the 2016 MC Homecoming October 13-15. Fall Break began October 21 for MC’s 5,133 students.

Stanford captured some stunning photos of the Clock Tower damage that summer evening soon after the weather-related incident.