Hide Article Text (OCR)
can guarantee to parents at a distance his high qualifications.Those qualifications included success as a student at the Winchester Academy and at Yale, a continued devotion to scholarship after he graduated from the latter institution in 1848, and several years of practicing law in his native city.Clark was not one of Winchester's more prominent attorneys. His name was not to be found among the celebrated local legal cases of the time, nor was he involved in politics, as were all of the best-known lawyers here in the 1850s — Clark's father, Wiliam Sr., his younger brother, 'Wiliam Jr., F.W.M. Holliday, Phillip Wiliams, Robert Young Conrad, James Marshall, and David Barton, to name a few.Peyton Clark was not a man destined for the bustling of politics or commerce or courts of law. By all accounts he was restrained and devoted to more sedentary pursuits.The Virginian editorial mentioned above went on to note that Clark had been lately engaged in collecting and preparing for publication, under a resolution of the Common Council, all the acts of the Colonial House of Burgesses and the General Assembly in relation to the town, with the ordinance of the corporation, the existing state laws in relation to towns, and the present state constitution.That work had been completed in such exemplary fashion, according to the editorial, that the council had adopted the following florid resolution:. . . This Council does hereby express its high appreciation of the efficient aid rendered by Peyton Clark, esq., to the committee appointed to report a revisal of the ordinance of this corporation, which, having been undertaken by him, has been so well performed; and the Council hereby tenders to him the cordial thanks of this body.Clark, who spent the rest of his life quietly as a teacher and scholar, was never again to receive such extensive praise in the local press, not even upon his death in 1878. Compared to his Wnchester contemporaries at Yale — his brother Wiliam (a future mayor, judge, and clerk of court of the city) and Holliday (a future governor of the state) — he remained outside the spotlight.' Not only was Peyton Clark temperamentally unsuited for the attainment of glory, but, unlike his brother and Holliday and nearly all the other men of the time, he saw no military action in that great glorifier of those who might otherwise have lingered always in obscurity — the Civil War.Due to a maiming injury he suffered in 1861, according to one of his obituaries, Clark was rendered unfit for combat and stayed behind in Wnchester and Frederick County throughout the war. Yet that fact, combined with the keen eye and literate prose he displayed in a journal he kept for much of 1862, have conspired to assign him a place in the history books.In 1985 Clark's 1862 journal was donated to the Handley Library in Wnchester, where since then many historians, both local and national, haveforces during the war and with two key battles of Stonewall Jackson's famous 1862 Valley campaign, Clark's writings have been quoted in an array of history articles and books published in the past 13 years. The portions of his diary that deal with the racial situation in Winchester after the Yankees first took control here are especially instructive, although historians have not yet made much use of that aspect of the document.Clark was bom on March 11,1827, in Winchester, the first child of William Lawrence Clark Sr., who by then was a successful attorney, and Louisa Morrow Peyton. The couple eventually had four more children—William Jn, Frank, Susan, and Julia.Little is known of Peyton Clark's early life, other than that he grew up in Winchester Giving in the house at 406 N. Loudoun Street pictured above), studied at the Winchester Academy, and then followed in his father's footsteps by attending Yale, the prestigious college in New Haven, Conn.Clark's time at Yale is illuminated only by a single letter written by Holliday (who graduated from the school in 1847) to his father in 1846. In the missive the future Virginia governor thanked his dad for sending him presents via his friend Clark, whom he referred to as Pate, and noted that after he received them he and his fellow Virginian sat for five hours discussing the people and affairs of old Winchester.After graduating from Yale, Clark took up the study of law. According to a report on the Yale class of 1848 published by the college in 1898, he did so for two years at the University of Virginia, but that school has no record of Clark having attended.Local historian Ben Ritter (who recently completed an index to Clark's 1862 journal) thinks it probable he actually studied law with his father, as his brother William (Yale class of '50) is reported to have done.Wherever he studied, Clark was evidently ready to begin the practice of law two years after he finished at Yale. He was listed in the 1850 census as an attorney, and the May 28, 1851, issue of the Winchester Virginian carried a small front-page ad for J. Peyton Clark, attorney at law who will attend the Courts of Frederick and adjacent counties.He worked as a lawyer here quietly (his name rarely appeared in any local newspapers) until he was appointed principal at the Winchester Academy in early 1856.A few months after he took over as principal, Clark married Cornelia Baldwin, the 22-year-old daughter of prominent local physician Robert T. Baldwin. The marriage joined two of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Winchester.William Clark senior was listed in the 1850 census as owning property worth $25,000, and Robert Baldwin claimed his was worth exactly twice that amount. In contrast, nearly one-half the local residents who listed their real estate’s value in the census placed it ataccording to Frederick County resident James Hutton's extensive study of the 1850 census.(In the 1860 census, Peyton Clark, who was probably living at the Wnchester Academy at the time and owned no real estate, listed personal property worth $1,880. That census also listed he and his wife as having two daughters, Louisa, 3, and Portia, 1.)The Winchester Academy, which was destroyed during the Civil War and never rebuilt, was described by T.K. Cartmell as having been “an imposing brick and stone structure.” It was located near the intersection of the current West Clifford Street and Academy Lane.The school, while still prestigious in the mid-’50s, had had four principals in the previous six years (the one prior to Clark had lasted only six weeks). It was with an apparent sense of relief that Robert Young Conrad, the president of the school's board of trustees, announced Clark's appointment in 1856.An ad the school placed in the Virginian in May of that year read: Mr. Clark, being a native and permanent resident of Winchester, is too well known to its citizens to need commendation here. It may be proper, however, to state for the information of others that he graduated with honors at Yale College, has since pursued his studies with the closest application, and in the opinion of the board is well-qualified by his talents, acquirements, and high character, to do ample justice to his new position. The institution, it is believed, is once more placed upon a permanent and reliable basis, and may fairly claim the support of its former friends and patrons, and of the public generally.Clark apparently lived up to those expectations. In September of 1857 the Academy announced in a Virginian ad that after the experience of another year The Trustees [who at the time included Conrad, Holliday, Marshall, Wiliams, and U.S. Sen. James Mason] take pleasure in expressing their continued and increased confidence in Mr. Clark's ability and efficiency as a teacher. Under his superintendence, which promises to be permanent, the school may now be regarded as firmly re-established.By 1858 that promise had been fulfilled, for in an ad in the Aug. 11, 1858, Virginian the trustees wrote of their school, which had been established more than 70 years ago, now being under the permanent superintendence of Clark.Under the new principal's leadership, the school continued to offer the same curriculum it had offered in previous years — Latin, Greek, French, English, math, and history, among other subjects.The rigorous nature of that study is revealed in a reminiscence written many years later by one Hugh Oglevy Pierce, who attended the Academy in the late '50s. Pierce wrote of having studied some Latin the summer before entering the school and of Clark insisting that he therefore begin in a second year Latin class, translating Caesar'sClockwise from above left: a photo taken in the 1920s of the house at 406 N. Loudoun St. in Winchester (now the Robinson Apartments) where John Peyton Clark grew up; Clark late in his life (he died in 1878 at the age of 51); Clark’s younger brother, William, who served as mayor, judge, and clerk of court of Winchester; and F.M.W. Holliday, the future governor of Virginia who grew up in Winchester and attended Yale with the Clark brothers and later practiced law in his native city before achieving success in politics.Commentaries on the Gallic War.After he had spent just over a month in the class, he wrote, Mr. Clark said, 'Pierce, you are too far advanced for this class; you must enter [a higher level Latin course] and translate Virgil.' The young student responded by pitching in tooth and nail to meet the challenge and succeeded in his work.On Sept. 1, '58, the Virginian praised Clark and other local teachers as being not simply school-keepers, but... ladies and gentlemen of the highest accomplishment whose leadership bode well for the future of the area and state.But in that immediate future dark storm clouds were rising.After Abraham Lincoln's election as president in November 1860, seven states of the Deep South seceded from the Union, and Virginians debated whether to join them. In early February of 1861 Winchester and Frederick County residents elected delegates to a state convention to decide the matter.Running as the two local candidates who favored immediate secession were Clark's father, William Sr., and his close friend Holliday. Running as anti-secession candidates were Winchester Academy trustees Conrad and Marshall. Marshall and Conrad won the election by a wide margin, and in Richmond Conrad led the anti-secession forces, which were at first in the ascendant. But with the firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina in April and Lincoln's subsequent call for Virginia to provide troops to help quell the rebellion, Conrad and Marshall's forces lost the fight, and on April 17 thexonvention voted to secede.Clark's position on secession is not known, though his later writings suggest he probably was in favor of it all along. Whatever his position on the issue, the injury he suffered — which local newspapers evidently did not report at the time and the exact nature of which neither Clark nor any of the other local Civil War diarists describe — kept him from fighting in the war secession brought on.^*****Despite the tumult of the months following Fort Sumter, the Winchester Academy remained in operation. Through late August 1861, the school continued to run ads very similar to the ones it had used before the war, all of them praising Clark's leadership.But the war soon interfered with the Academy's operations. The Aug. 30,1861, issue of the Winchester Republican, another local weekly, contained an ad from the school over Clark's initials and the date Aug. 23, 1861, that read: The regular exercises of the Winchester Academy will be resumed on the 1st of September, or as soon thereafter as the building now used as a Military Hospital shall be vacated, which the principal is assured will be about that time.That ad sounds as if it’s referring to Sept. 1 of 1861, but if that's the case, plans soon changed. In December of'61 the Republican ran another ad. which stated the school would open the first Monday of September, presumably in1862.And in Januaiy of ’62, Clark reported that the exercises of the Winchester Academy... will be resumed on the first Monday in February in the room formerly occupied by the Winchester Library Company, over the store of L.E. Swartzwelder on Loudoun Street.If classes did resume in February, they didn’t last long. In early March Stonewall Jackson pulled his Confederate troops out of Winchester, and a few days later Northern forces entered the city for the first time.It is that event that sparked Clark to begin his journal (which will be discussed in detail in next weeks Edition i. the first entry of which is dated March 12, 1862.
Newspaper Details
Winchester Star
Winchester, Virginia, US
Wed, Apr 01, 1998
Page 32
Full Page
Clipped by
Handley R.
VA, USA 03 Aug 2024
Other Publications Near Winchester, Virginia
The Winchester Times
The Star
The Evening Star
Winchester Gazette
Winchester Evening Star
