Grace Baptist Church

The Grace Baptist Church stood at the corner of Witcham and Jackson Streets in Derry, a white wood-frame building topped with a slender spire that was the apotheosis of New England Protestant church architecture. The clock in its steeple, constructed and shipped from Switzerland in 1898, was donated by Stephen Bowie, a timber baron who lived on West Broadway and served as a church deacon for forty years. The clock cost approximately $17,000 and was unique in the region; the only other like it stood in the town square of Haven Village, forty miles away. Bowie, who was also president of Derry's chapter of the Maine Legion of White Decency during several of his later years as deacon, was known for his devout layman sermons on Mother's Day, which he always referred to reverently as Mother's Sunday.

The Clock's Silence and the Storm

From its installation until May 31st, 1985, the clock had failed to chime only once before: on the day of the explosion at the Kitchener Ironworks in 1906, when it did not chime the noon hour. Residents believed the Reverend Jollyn had silenced the clock in mourning for the dead children, though he never disabused them of this notion. On the morning of May 31st, 1985, the clock did not chime the hour of five. At that moment, all over Derry, old-timers opened their eyes and sat up, disturbed for no reason they could identify. Norbert Keene, then in his nineties, hobbled to his window and felt a deep, obscure sense of threat, as if a poison were working its way toward his heart. Egbert Thoroughgood, ninety-nine, awoke from a nightmare of Claude Heroux's axe. Dave Gardener, who had discovered George Denbrough's mutilated body in 1957, felt a large, ill-defined fright, and Chief Andrew Rademacher, standing on his porch, felt the same disquiet as the first dime-sized drops of rain darkened the sidewalk.

The Destruction of the Steeple

The clock chimed neither six nor seven that morning. At 7:20 A.M., three minutes after a hoary old maple fell in the Old Cape neighborhood, the clock in the tower chimed thirteen times. A minute later, a blue-white stroke of lightning struck the steeple. Heather Libby, the minister's wife, happened to be looking out the kitchen window of the parsonage and said the steeple "exploded like someone loaded it up with dynamite." Whitewashed boards, chunks of beams, and clockwork from Switzerland showered down onto the street. The ragged remains of the steeple burned briefly and then guttered out in the rain, which was now a tropical downpour.

The Church in Derry's Unraveling

The destruction of the Grace Baptist Church's steeple was one of many catastrophic events that marked the storm of May 31st, 1985, which accompanied the Losers' Club's final battle with It. The storm caused the collapse of downtown Derry, the destruction of the Standpipe, and the flooding of the Canal. In the weeks that followed, the church's fate became part of the larger pattern of Derry's decline. The Derry Mall, which stood on the site of the defunct Kitchener Ironworks, was declared a total loss after a series of explosions. The Raytheon company, which had been scheduled to break ground on a Derry plant, decided at the last minute to build in Waterville instead. The city, which had thrived for over a century on a cycle of violence and forgetting, began to die like a nightshade whose time to bloom had come and gone.