Historic holiday lights displayed in Gaston

Five Gaston men have worked together for the seventh Christmas season in a row to make sure a West Gastonia tradition continues.

Illuminated stars and colorful lights shaped like a Christmas tree adorn the tower at Loray Mill on Second Avenue.

The lights will burn nightly through New Years and for the men assembling them on the century-old brick structure, it’s a labor of love.

Clifford Hamm, a World War II veteran from Gastonia, is the eldest of the group. He said the idea of putting the lights up derived from his grown son, Greg Hamm.

The group has worked on the annual tradition for seven years.

The holiday lights burned bright for decades during the holiday season but were put out of commission in the early 1990s when rubber manufacturer Firestone moved its most of its operations from the Loray Mill site to Kings Mountain.

Seven years ago, Clifford Hamm made a few calls trying to find out where the lights were being held.

One call was to his friend, 58-year-old Al Forbes of Gastonia.

Forbes knew a Firestone engineer and that proved to be the key the men needed to locate the holiday lights.

They were being held on the old Loray Mill property in a storage warehouse and assembled on the building that Christmas.

Hamm said he initially had no idea how the lights were going to be put atop the brick tower.

David Haas, 51, of Kings Mountain, uses a truck and a winch to hoist the stars from the lawn in front of the mill to the tower.

The men installed the lights again this year on Nov. 19.

Joining the men in assembling the lights this year is 27-year-old Seth Heustess of Gastonia.

“It’s absolutely a team effort,” Clifford Hamm said. “We like to think that this project that we do is appreciated in the community here, especially in West Gastonia.”

One star adorns each of the brick tower’s four façades. They’re 12 feet from tip to tip, weigh about 75 pounds and have a 34-foot circumference.

The stars are believed to date back to the late 1940s or early 1950s.

Preservation North Carolina, a nonprofit historical preservation organization, supplies the light bulbs and Firestone Corporation pays the electric bill, Hamm said.