Harry Pritchard, a farm worker by trade, married Mabel Martin in 1913. In 1929, the couple moved onto a ten-acre hillside farm on Lower Howard’s Creek. Their homestead was just a little upstream from Hall’s Restaurant. The ruins of their home are stop #3 on the John Holder Trail in the Lower Howard’s Creek Nature & Heritage Preserve.
In the photograph above, Harry and Mabel and dog Butch are seated on their front porch. One can see that Mabel has a small piece of tape above each eye. She suffered from ptosis, a condition marked by drooping eyelids. (In photos where Mabel does not have the tape, her eyes are essentially closed.)
The Pritchards raised a family here without any of the modern conveniences that almost everyone took for granted—electric, telephone, sewer, or water service. Their extreme isolation was somewhat broken by a dirt road across the ridge, known in memory as the old Athens-Boonesboro Turnpike.
The couple lived here until 1970 when both fell ill, and their children brought them to a nursing home in Newport. Harry passed away that September at the age of 82. Mabel, 90, died three weeks later. They are buried in Winchester Cemetery.
