A commemoration of Benjamin Franklin’s uncle, Thomas Franklin, is incorporated into a new work of art by a Northampton Artist. The full story is here.

Excerpt from that article:

Thomas Franklin – Benjamin’s uncle – lived in Ecton and was an inventor; musician; the village schoolteacher; a clerk of the county courts, a lawyer to the archdeacon; and a successful bell-founder, notably for Lichfield Cathedral. Some believe that what is now Ecton’s Three Horseshoes pub was Franklin’s bell-foundry.

He even undertook civil engineering works to prevent the village meadows from flooding.

He designed a music box-type contraption that connected the church bells to its clock mechanism so they chimed automatically four times a day, every four-hours. This would have proved very useful to villagers since, in those days, there was no clock-face on the tower. The chimes also played the tunes of two hymns. The mechanism survives and is still in Ecton’s church.