Only in York County

Happy Easter, everyone! Easter is my favorite holiday – there is so much hope and grace tied up with it. That’s something I can really celebrate.

What’s inside

1. Where is Philip Livingston buried?
2. Memories of Grade A candy
3. Creature from the York Fair

1. Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence from New York, died in York, PA, in 1778 and is buried in York. Where is his grave? I understand it is in York.
– Shirley Schneider

Shirley, you’re correct; Livingston’s grave is now a part of Prospect Hill Cemetery on North George Street, near North York. You can read more about it here on FindAGrave.com and also on Jim McClure’s York Town Square blog in this 2007 post.

Interestingly, Livingston was first buried in the churchyard of the German Reformed Church on West Market Street, according to the FindAGrave biography, and When that land was needed to build a Sunday school addition, the graves there were moved to Prospect Hill.

2. When I was a little girl, my mother always bought candy called Grade As at the 5 & 10. It was a square about 2 inches square and came in big blocks of chocolate that they would break apart for as much as you wanted. Each square had a big A on it. We thought it was the best chocolate we ever ate. Whatever happened to it? Please help. I could eat a piece right now.
– Jean M. Smith

What an appropriate question, what with all the Easter chocolate I’m sure is around today! About the only mention I found at first on these was on OldWilmington.net, essentially the counterpart of Only in York County for Wilmington, Delaware. The thing that told me is that these MAY not have been made in York County, though I’m sure they could have been regionally produced.

Well, some more digging turned up that these were made by the Klein Chocolate Co. of Elizabethtown, which was sold to M&M Mars in the 1970s, according to this message board.

That helped a TON, and I was able to find this, from the Elizabethtown Historical Society website:

Klein’s Chocolate Company was incorporated in 1914, a year after William and Frederick Klein began manufacturing milk chocolate in Elizabethtown. Klein Chocolate Company became a major player in the candy business with national distribution for their products. By 1922 the company employed 200 people and produced 250,000 chocolate bars a day. To produce that chocolate the plant required six million quarts of milk a year, which gave area dairy farmers a steady market.

Here, you can see a postcard of the Klein factory.

And while it doesn’t get a Grade A bar in your mouth, I did find a neat coincidence – unknown to me, my husband had written about Klein around this time last year!

3. My best friend just posed a question that has us all scratching our heads. We remember back in the late ’50s that we had this odd stuffed creature with wire in its arms and legs that you wrapped around your arm. I remember mine was red with gold fringe and I bet I got it at the York Fair. Can anyone help us out?
– Eileen H. Ritter

This is one I could really use some help on. Any idea what these were called? Anyone else have them? I’m stumped!

Got any questions? Ask Joan using the form at right. I’ll attempt to answer them in a future “Ask Joan” column on this blog. I get a large volume, but I will feature three each week and answer as many as possible!