Seth Thomas Clock Company of Thomaston, Connecticut, cast the Baxter Clock in 1920, though its design - lions with iron rings in their mouths, Corinthian capitals trimmed in fern palmettes, fluted columns and arabesque crockets - belonged to the late 19th century. By 1920, the era of the American street clock was already closing. They had thrived from the 1860s through the 1910s, when jewelers, opticians, and watchmakers used them as both advertisement and public service: tell time, sell time, draw the eye. The Baxter Clock arrived a decade late to that party. It would not be installed on the sidewalk until 1930, when Baxter's Jewelry Store had been at 323 Pollock Street for a decade and could finally afford the ironwork. Its four faces read "BAXTER THE JEWELER" on the north and south and "DR. J.O. BAXTER EYESIGHT SPECIALIST" on east and west. One business, two trades, twenty feet of advertising.

On May 5, 1977, a furniture truck backed into the pedestal hard enough to bend it. The Baxters acted fast. The next morning, a salvage company arrived to lift the clock off cleanly so it could be repaired. The cast-iron casing came up. The cable slipped. The clock fell. The casing was bent but not destroyed; the inner workings - the iron weight that descended along two rods, the steel-and-copper pendulum, the small interior clock with the inscription Seth Thomas, No. 2139, July 24, 1920 - took the brunt of the impact. The Baxters tried to find someone who could repair it. They tried to find someone who could replace it. Both efforts failed. The fragments went into the basement of the jewelry store. For fourteen years, only the empty pedestal stood on the sidewalk, like a tooth socket with no tooth.

In 1990, the Swiss Bear Downtown Development Corporation - a non-profit named for the Bernese coat of arms that gave New Bern its symbol - took on the clock as a restoration project. The Baxter family transferred ownership on the condition that it actually be restored. Swiss Bear in turn told the city: if you take over maintenance afterward, we will lead the campaign. A Swiss Bear representative tracked down the Verdin Company of Cincinnati, Ohio, which had inherited Seth Thomas's original casting patterns. Verdin still had the molds. The Baxter Clock Restoration Campaign raised $28,000 from local donors. New castings were poured to match the originals. The surviving pieces were repaired or rebuilt. On April 20, 1991, with Patricia Dorsey, North Carolina's Secretary of Cultural Resources, in attendance, the clock was unveiled back on its pedestal at 323 Pollock Street. It is believed to be the only operating clock of its kind remaining in North Carolina, and one of only three of its design known to remain anywhere in the United States.

Today the building behind the clock houses Baxters 1892, a jazz club and bar. The Pollock Street block has changed and rearranged itself many times since 1930. The clock has not. Its four faces still carry the same lettering - BAXTER THE JEWELER, DR. J.O. BAXTER EYESIGHT SPECIALIST - the way a tombstone keeps a name long after the family has moved away. The lions still bite their iron rings. The Corinthian capital still wears its ferns. At night, the faces glow. From the air, the clock is invisible - a dot under tree canopy - but Pollock Street is one of the legible thoroughfares of the New Bern Historic District, running east from the Trent River bridge into the heart of the colonial town. Approach New Bern from the west, look for the cluster of slate roofs and the white spire of First Presbyterian, and you are looking down at the block where time was nearly lost, and then was not.