Marriage and Family
After returning from his cross-country expedition, Clark married Julia Hancock on January 5, 1808, at Fincastle, Virginia. They had five children: Meriwether Lewis Clark, Sr. (1809–1881), named after his friend and expedition partner; William Preston Clark (1811–1840); Mary Margaret Clark (1814–1821); George Rogers Hancock Clark (1816–1858), named after Clark's older brother; and John Julius Clark (1818–1831), named after his oldest brother Jonathan and Clark's wife.
After Julia's death in 1820, William Clark married her first cousin, Harriet Kennerly Radford. They had three children together: Jefferson Kearny Clark (1824–1900), named after the president; Edmund Clark (1826–1827); and Harriet Clark, named after her mother (dates unknown; died as child). His second wife Harriet died in 1831.
Clark died in St. Louis on September 1, 1838 at age 68. He was buried in the Bellefontaine Cemetery, where a 35-foot (11 m) gray granite obelisk was erected to mark his grave. The cemetery has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
Read more about this topic: William Clark (explorer)
Famous quotes containing the words marriage and/or family:
“We lov’d, and we lov’d, as long as we could,
Till our love was lov’d out in us both;
But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled:
‘Twas pleasure first made it an oath.”
—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)