100 years later, Delta clock keeps on ticking
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. http://www.deltaborough.org/home_town-10_016.htm
The authoritative “The River and the Ridge" http://www.harfordhistory.net/river.htm 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, the Main 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 Little Courthouse
-- 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
