by Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist
我告诉过你 几周前 og体育平台 Sarah Freeman Clarke, whose papers form part of the newly processed Perry-Clarke additions. I’d like to continue now with my series of deep dives into this collection by introducing you to 安娜 Huidekoper Clarke.
安娜 was born on 5 November 1814 in Meadville, Pennsylvania. 她的父亲, Harm Jan Huidekoper, was a Dutch immigrant and wealthy landowner, in fact one of the largest landowners in the United States. Harm and his wife, Rebecca Colhoon Huidekoper, had seven children. 可悲的是, the first two died young, but the rest lived to adulthood: Alfred, 埃德加, 安娜, 弗雷德里克, 和伊丽莎白.
It would be difficult to talk og体育平台 the Huidekopers without talking og体育平台 Meadville, a town with which the family is inextricably linked. Meadville is located in western Pennsylvania, only og体育平台 20 miles from the Ohio border. Harm first visited Meadville in 1802, just 14 years after white settlers had established the town. In his autobiography, he described it as “a small village, containing 25 or 30 houses, 主要是原木, and a population of og体育平台 150 inhabitants.”
Despite this uninspiring description, Harm decided to settle in Meadville and built a large house, 波莫纳大厅, at 1119 Water Street. (This site is now the location of Holland Towers Apartments.) The Huidekoper home became, 大家都说, a center of the social and cultural life of Meadville and, 根据 一些 来源, even a stop on the Underground Railroad. It was here that 安娜 was born and raised.
重要的是, 在19世纪, the town of Meadville also became “an important outpost of Unitarianism” (Harm Jan Huidekoper, p. 317). 伤害, a convert to Unitarianism, and his son 弗雷德里克, a Unitarian minister, founded a seminary called Meadville Theological School in 1844.
Most of the Huidekopers were intimately involved with the operations of the school for many years: Harm was co-founder, 金融家, and first board president; Alfred was first secretary and trustee; 埃德加 was treasurer and superintendent of Divinity Hall; and 弗雷德里克 was co-founder, 教授, 图书管理员, 和财务主管. 不甘落后, Elizabeth Gertrude Huidekoper, the youngest of the siblings, picked up the mantle: she was the first woman to serve as a trustee, presided as board president for 17 years, donated real estate and library books to the school, and even provided financial assistance to individual students. She was known by 一些 as “the mother of Meadville.”
180年后, the seminary is still in existence, as part of the Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago.
安娜 was the only one of her siblings to leave Meadville. On 15 August 1839, she married Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke, and the couple eventually settled in Boston. They had four children: Herman Huidekoper Clarke, Lilian Freeman Clarke, Eliot Channing Clarke, and Cora Huidekoper Clarke. 安娜 was very active in her community, serving as treasurer of the Church of the Disciples branch of the American Unitarian Association Women’s Auxiliary Conference, vice president of the South End Industrial School, and member of the board of directors of the New England Hospital.
安娜 and James’s marriage was evidently a happy one; their voluminous and loving correspondence in the Perry-Clarke additions testifies to that. The collection also contains letters to 安娜 from a number of close friends, including many from her teenage years discussing fashion and local gossip, as well as correspondence of most of the Huidekopers I’ve mentioned.
安娜’s life, of course, had its tragedies. She lost her son Herman to scarlet fever when he was just eight or nine years old. Her papers in the collection include a few pages of anecdotes og体育平台 Herman, of the “kids say the darnedest things” variety. 安娜 also recorded the reactions of her other children to their brother’s death. For example, Lilian said, “Mother, I wish I would waken up 一些 morning & find it all a dream.” And Eliot asked, “Is there no way to make Herman come back again?”
安娜 died in Boston on 2 April 1897.