At noon each day, a bugle would announce the beginning of a race between five hand-carved statues of figures with local significance: George Rogers Clark, Daniel Boone, Thomas Jefferson, King Louis XVI of France, and the Belle of Louisville.

[1][3] Several mechanized sculptures of notable past Louisvillians watched from above in a Victorian-esque gazebo: Mary Anderson, D.W. Griffith, Zachary Taylor, Henry Watterson, and the trumpeter Oliver Cooke.

In 1974, former mayor Wilson W. Wyatt found funding and formed a committee that selected Barney Bright of Louisville to design the clock.

Later in 1986 the clock was relocated to the Kentucky Fair and Exposition Center, but the city stopped making repairs and it sat inactive for years before being removed in 1993.

According to The Courier Journal,[9] "The clock moved around the end of June from its Theater Square location on Fourth Street, where it had sat since August 2012, and been inoperative for nearly the year prior.