Sarah Freeman Clarke

Dorchester, 1808 - 1896, Marietta

BiographyLC name authority id n95000359
LC Heading:Clarke, Sarah Freeman, 1808-1896
(artist and founder of the Clarke Library (the first public library in Marietta, Ga., p. ix))

Biography:
Sarah Anne Clarke was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts on January 21, 1808. She was born at an interesting crossroads in the history of America into New England generation that would lead changes in every aspect of American life. Her parents, Samuel Clarke (1779-1830) and Rebecca Parker Hull Clarke (1790-1865), encouraged Sarah to read at an exceptionally young age. Her father, in particular, required that Sarah learn a classical education alongside her brothers. She spent summers learning from her step-grandfather, Dr. James Freeman, founder of the American Unitarian Church and married to Samuel Clarke’s mother, at his summer home in Newton, Massachusetts.

Sarah was also close to her maternal grandparents, George Hull and Sarah Fuller Hull. George Hull was a Revolutionary War soldier who served as Governor of the Michigan Territory at the outbreak of the War of 1812. After being ordered to invade Canada with few resources, he was quickly surrounded by enemy troops and their Native American allies and surrendered. He was court martialed, charged with treason and sentenced to by shot. President James Madison reprieved the sentence and Hull returned home to Newton to be with his family. Years later, General Hull would introduce Sarah and her brothers to a friend from his days in the Revolution, General LaFayette.

In 1816, the Clarke family moved to Boston where Sarah began to develop a talent in painting. Her family marveled at her talent. General Hull would introduce his granddaughter to the famous portrait painter, Gilbert Stuart. Sarah later became one of the first professional artists of the nineteenth century. Washington Allston, a famous Boston Romantic landscape painter, took her on as his only pupil. Sarah produced numerous sketches and paintings for various publications and her artwork was displayed in a showing at the Boston Athenaeum.

After the death of Sarah’s father in 1830, Rebecca Clarke and Sarah set up a boarding house in the heart of a prospering Boston. The venture lasted only a few years but allowed Sarah to be introduced to the future reformers, poets, artists and authors shaping American culture. There, she would befriend the Peabody sisters. Elizabeth Peabody went on to introduce the concept of Kindergarten to the United States. Her sister, Sophia, married author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her other sister, Mary, married educational reformer Horace Mann. Both men and all of the sisters would become life-long friends of Sarah. After closing the boarding house, Sarah returned to Newton. Through her relationships with new friends from the boarding house and through her brother James Freeman Clarke attending Harvard, Sarah would spent the next few years meeting a wide variety of prodigies. Her friendships included the likes of feminist Margaret Fuller, educator Bronson Alcott, artist Washington Allston, future President Benjamin Pierce, and poets Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The New England circle of friends was remarkable. All valued the talents and thoughts of Sarah. They encouraged her to pursue her artistic talents and Emerson asked her to contribute to the Transcendentalist publication, The Dial, in 1840.

Despite her incredible connections, Sarah rarely asserted herself to step into the spotlight. She repeatedly sacrifices her momentum to care for ailing family members. In a wonderful biography written by Joan Alice Kopp and Scott Grady Bowden in 1993, they note that “feelings of frustration resulted from her inability to capture the creative inspirations which seemed to drift fleetingly in and out of her daily activities.”[1] She was brilliant and multi-talented and inherited a restlessness from her father. It was not until her mother died in 1865 that Sarah seemed to slow down. She left for Italy in 1868 to paint and study Dante. She ended up staying for ten years.

In 1878, she received news that her brothers Samuel and Abraham were in declining health. Samuel suffered from rheumatism and Abraham was no longer able to take care of himself. His wife needed help. The two brothers sought the restoring benefits of a resort town called Marietta, Georgia. Sarah would make her way to Marietta to be close to her family. She was also returning as a more confident woman and decided to step out of the shadows of her famous friends. She wanted to create things of her own. She began referring to herself as Sarah Freeman Clarke instead of Sarah Anne Clarke perhaps as a way of distinguishing this new woman she had become.

In July 1880, Sarah oversaw the construction of her new home on Whitlock Avenue just outside of Marietta. The five-acre property included a small building behind the house where Sarah housed her collection of two thousand books. New Marietta friends began requesting to borrow from her extensive collection, and she began to call the building the Franklin Lending Library. Kopp and Bowden posit the Franklin name was derived from Benjamin Franklin and his creation of a library in Philadelphia. Sarah created a catalogue of her library in 1883 and solicited help from her brother James as a trustee at the Boston Public Library to assist fill requests and gaps in her collection.

After traveling to Boston in 1888 to attend James Clarke’s funeral, she told her friends she wanted to make the library a permanent feature for the people of Marietta. Her Boston friends organized a fundraiser to help her efforts. Books and financial donations poured into Marietta. Oliver Wendell Holmes sent a complete set of his works with his personal bookplates. Sarah was able to coordinate a merger with the Marietta Library Association to purchase a lot in the city for a new library building.

Sarah devoted herself to the design of the library building. She based the design on the works of Sir Anthony Panizzi of the London Museum and phrenologist and lecturer, Orson Fowler. The dome structure of the British Museum’s reading room created a space where shelves could be placed on all sides with ample light streaming in from windows at the apex. Fowler argued that an octagonal shape would present a healthier environment from the light and create more space. By September, the unusual building was complete and stocked with a donation of more than two thousand books from Sarah and her friends. On October 26, 1893, it officially opened to the people of Marietta. A plaque above the door describes Sarah’s goal:

This building and many books

Are a gift from friends to the Clarke Library Association of Marietta

October A.D., 1893

Apply thy heart unto instruction and thine ears to the words of knowledge

Proverbs of Solomon

The Sarah Freeman Clarke Library operated at its original location for seventy years. Until 1920, a subscription fee was required, but Sarah ensured that a wing was created for free lending to African Americans.[2] Caroline Healey Dall from Washington, D.C. visited the library shortly after its opening. She wrote, “I was present at the distribution of books, the entries being made by Miss Clarke herself. Women were introduced to me who had walked five miles to secure their book and the eager gratitude of all was painful, it testified to such an intellectual famine.”[3]

Wings were added to the building in 1938 and 1945, but the octagonal shape remained distinct. By the late 1950s, the demand for books and their supply were outgrowing the building. In 1957, the Marietta Journal noted “trying to serve Marietta readers through the Clarke Library is like serving coffee in a thimble.”[4] In 1963, the library contents moved to the old post office building on Atlanta Street on the other side of Marietta Square. The Clarke building served several purposes from 1963 to the 1990s, including a fine arts center. A painting by my mother hung there in the 1970s. The Cobb County Landmarks Society leased the building in the 1990s, and it is currently home to Mike Whittle’s florist shop. I would like to think her artistic sensibilities are memorialized in the amazing floral artistry of Whittle’s shop.

Sarah Freeman Clarke died on November 17, 1896 at her home on Whitlock Avenue in Marietta. After a life of being surrounded with some of the greatest writers, artists and reformers of the nineteenth century who left their lasting mark on culture and scholarship, Sarah left something of herself to Marietta. The strange little building stands a testament to her entire life accumulating knowledge and interesting people, of traveling the world and coming home to take care of her family and friends.

There is so much more to Sarah’s story that I could not put it all in this short post. Kopp and Bowden’s biography of this fascinating woman is very well researched and documented. They include excerpts of her surviving letters and the comments made of her by her famous friends. I defer you to their expertise to find out more about Sarah and her family.

http://www.thehistoryaroundus.com/sarah-freeman-clarke-1808-1896/

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Last Updated8/7/24

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