Background
He was born on April 16, 1857 in Fayette, Missouri, United States, the first son and second of five children of Carr Waller and Betty Susan (Smith) Pritchett. Both parents were natives of Virginia, his father's Welsh forebears having come there early in the eighteenth century. The elder Pritchett, whose family moved to Missouri in 1835, had little formal education but became a Methodist minister and a teacher of mathematics and astronomy. In 1866 he founded the Pritchett School Institute (later Pritchett College) at Glasgow, Missouri.