I was driving past a small branch bank and noticed that it has turned into office space for the county government. So I went in to look around and discovered a very old Diebold door in a 1970s building with an interesting story.

In 1892 a downtown bank was constructed and this door was installed. It went out of business circa 1949 and is currently a law office. In 1971 a new bank was constructed not too far away and this door was taken out of the old building and installed in the new building. After changing hands several times it was purchased by the county.

The door is a Diebold automatic which may be a bit unusual for a vault, but was more common in safes? The building's construction date should put it at 1892 but one of the patent dates is 1894. Perhaps it was retrofitted with a newer mechanism or perhaps the old bank started out with a safe and later upgraded to a vault.

I took a few pictures, here are three:

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And a couple of questions:

1 - In the picture of the inside of the door you can barely see two columns of holes (which are tapped); in the picture of the timelock you can see two of these, on either side of the case, and two more holes in the door proper directly above. It looks like there used to be something attached to the door, something very long and wide, which was removed later. Any ideas what was there?

2 - Aside from the timelock and the bolt motor directly below it, there is a second large box to the right of the motor. I'm assuming this is a second set of springs to assist the bolt motor in handling a large door's worth of bolts compared to a smaller safe which it was designed for?

The county has no intention of using the door, it's just a decoration to them. The vault itself is being used for storage (and it has an inner set of doors with a combination lock, which they also do not use, and a sort of "moat" between the doors with a carpeted "drawbridge" that has to be removed to close the doors).

I also noticed the timelock is mounted on what appears to be a spring plate and I would presume this is for dynamite resistance.