York Town Square

This is the Humphrey Pritchard clock at the Old Line Museum in Delta, Pa. The museum’s website, source of this photo, states that the clock is made of three types of slate. The clock’s maker was a career slate miner.  Also of interest: Check out these YorkTownSquare.com stories and photos about Delta/Peach Bottom and that area’s Welsh quarrymen.

Southeastern York County has bred a 7-foot-2-inch player that has been at it for 100 years.
And no, this player didn’t toil for the championship Kennard-Dale High School basketball team in the mid-1990s… .

The player is the Humphry Pritchard’s slate clock, on display at the Old Line Museum in Delta.
The authoritative “The River and the Ridge” tells the clock’s story:
It took slateworker Pritchard a year and a half to build the clock, made out of three kids of slate: dark slate from Peach Bottom, and green and red slate from outside county boundaries.
Pritchard used slate entirely, except for conduit for wiring. About 1,300 tiny screws hold the timepiece together.
Why did Pritchard build the clock?
No one knows. One theory is that he had a speech problem that curbed his social life.
The clock and its home, Delta’s Old Line Museum, are now on York Town Square’s list of unsung artifiacts or locales in York County. (“The River and the Ridge” merits discovery as well.)
The previous list (search for posts under York Town Square archives):
— The JCC’s Holocaust sculpture
— The Little Courthouse
— Aldersgate United Methodist Church’s Copper Beach carving.
— Prospect Hill Cemetery
— War Mothers Memorial
— Work War II USO at former York County Academy gymnasium
— York’s Salem Square soldiers monument
— York’s Cookes House
— York’s rowhouses
— Wrightsville’s monuments
— The Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge
— Memorial trees along highways Route 30 & Susquehanna Trail
— The Inches
— Camp Stewartstown
— The Wrightsville Bridge supports
— New York Wire Co.’s factory whistle
— Mary Ann Furnace
— York’s Hartman Building
— Hanover’s Iron Mike and The Picket
— York’s Eberts Lane
— Helen Reeves Thackston Memorial Park
— WW II defense worker housing
— Shiloh’s former town square
— Loucks one-room school
— Red Lion’s Fairmount Park— Carlisle Avenue Market House
— York’s Fairmount Neighborhood — Ma & Pa Railroad, Muddy Creek Forks draw fans
— Delta’s slate clock and Mainline Museum — Spring Grove’s top-of-class museum
— York’s Reservoir Hill
— Forgotten York Valley Inn
— Wallace-Cross Mill
— Jefferson town square
— James Buchanan’s home “Wheatland”
— Columbia’s Clock and Watch Museum.

Also of interest:

See a photo of the Pritchard slate clock at the Old Line Museum’s website.