Item Detail
-
Clark, Mary Louisa Woolley
-
1848-1938
-
MSS 827
-
Biography
-
Mary Louisa Woolley Clark was born July 5, 1848 to Edwin Woolley and Mary Wickersham, while they were en route to Utah. The family arrived in Salt Lake City on September 20. When visiting her brother in Grantsville, Mary met Joshua Reuben Clark, whom she married on July 11, 1870. They lived in a log room on the side of her brother's home in Grantsville, and the next summer, they built a house north of there. They moved there in the fall and had their first child that September, in 1971. After living there for two years, the moved in with a friend, had another son, and then they moved to a different house. They had another son before moving back to the house they had built previously. They then lived in a friend's house for five years, where they had three children. Following, they bought a farm in the southern part of Grantsville, and there, they had four more children. Six years later, they bought another home, although they tore it down and rebuilt it, living in a kitchen and tent while it was under construction. Mary's husband died in 1929, and Mary died February 10, 1938.
-
Part of the J. Allen Parkinson collection, this is a six-page autobiography, compiled and written in part by Kathleen Clark. It is located in the fourth folder of the collection, which is labeled, Biographies, CA-CU. In the manuscript, Mary recalls taking first prize at a city fair when only seven or eight years old; when she was fifteen, she received her Temple endowments, and when seventeen, she had spun enough yearn to make a dress and two suits for her brothers. She also helped make men's shirts to be sold. She visited her brothers frequently in St. George and Grantsville, and she was active in the LDS Church. She sang in the choir, and she provides details of some of the singing parts she had. Mary writes further concerning various sicknesses her children faced, such as whooping cough, mumps, measles, chicken pox, and scarlet fever. She and Joshua had a total of ten children, and she writes about their marriages, activities, and deaths. For her and Joshua's Golden Wedding, they held a party in their summerhouse. After this point, the autobiography switches into a biographical standpoint, as Kathleen writes that Mary had a wonderful life. She also writes that Mary comes from a long line of ancestors, which includes a heritage of fifteen kings and a queen. She concludes the manuscript by writing, Most of this story is taken from an autobiography written a few months before she[Mary] died. Kathleen writes that she tried to write the biography, as Mary would have told it. The relationship between Kathleen and Mary is unclear.