At her home in Dodge Center, Minn., on the morning of May 8, 1912, after a brief illness following a prolonged period of poor health, Mrs. H. D. Clarke in the sixty-second year of her age.
Anna M. Jennings, the daughter of Thomas and Ann Mathews Jennings, was born at Oxfordshire, England, October 21, 1850.
While still an infant, she came with her parents to America, the death and burial at sea of a sister marking the voyage with grief.
The family settled on a farm in Herkimer County, New York, where they became successful in establishing a home.
At ten years of age, she went to live with a prosperous farmer and merchant in Unadilla Forks, New York, where she was taught excellent housekeeping. Early in life she was baptized and united with the Free Baptist church in that town, but upon her marriage to Herman D. Clarke, she became a member of the Seventh-day Baptist Church at Leonardsville, New York.
When of age, she attended the West Winfield Academy in New York State and soon became a teacher. She continued to teach for a year after her marriage while Mr. Clarke was at Alfred University. They commenced housekeeping in Unadilla Forks, but when her husband was called to the gospel ministry, she loyally left a beautiful new home and went with him to pastorates at Verona, and Independence, New York, Dodge Center, Minn., and Garwin, Iowa. She retained her membership with this last named church. In the pastorates she has been faithful and efficient as a pastor's wife, occupying the usual offices of such a woman, and everywhere has been active in watching with the sick, laying out the dead, as was the former custom, and ministering to the bodily wants of the needy. She was a timid woman and in all these active ministrations seemed always unconscious of her own worth.
When Elder Clarke began the work of placing orphan children in all the Northwestern states, she would sometimes accompany him to New York City, and care for the waifs on the journeys. She has received many of these into her home temporarily until placed in permanent homes.
She went to Cincinnati, Ohio, this winter to join her husband in the new work with the Children's Country Home Society. But health gradually failed and she returned to the Dodge Center home in April, whence she was peacefully called to her heavenly home.
Her husband and three children, Mrs. Arthur Ellis, Mrs. C. S. Sayre and Elvan H. Clarke attended her with loving ministrations during the last hours. These with three brothers and two sisters besides a wide circle of friends whose affections she won by her sweet womanly qualities, mourn the loss of a true and faithful sister, wife, mother and friend.
Further evidence of the warm esteem in which she was held was the profusion of flowers arranged by loving hands in the Seventh-day Baptist church where the farewell services were held. T. J. V.
