2 – Hannah Harrington Clark
Hannah Harrington Clark (b. 1737)
moved with her husband Elijah Clark from North Carolina to the Ceded Lands (or
“Distressed Territories,” according to missionary evangelists) of Georgia in
the fall of 1773. Described as a “large, muscular” woman, Hannah, then the
mother of several young children, was known to be quiet but efficient and
authoritative.
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| Reconstructed Clark cabin at Elijah Clark State Park, Lincolnton |
The family settled on Red Lick
Creek, a fork of Long Creek. The fort they established became known as Clark’s
Camp or Clark’s Station, and the creek Clark’s Creek. Clark called it “Woburn.”
Wild grapes, oats, cane and peavines flourished in forests burned off annually
by Creek Indians, streams teemed with shad and trout, and flocks of wild
pigeons could take two days to pass over. Yet the area that became Wilkes
County in 1777 seethed with unrest against the Indians as well as British
Loyalists. Clark became a leader of Wilkes County militia serving every three
months from November 1776 to June 1780, leaving Hannah to guard the home front
during a time backwoods atrocities rivaled those depicted by the Mel Gibson
movie “The Patriot.”
Hannah was not one to be cowed by
British reprisals. One winter she sewed a dozen fine, frilled-bosom shirts for
Elijah, only to have a maid reveal their smokehouse hiding spot. Hannah didn’t
forget the shirt incident. After Elijah was wounded in the first siege of
Augusta, she rode fifty miles with twins in her saddle to his camp. As her
house burned at the hands of Tories, British soldiers accosted her and tried to
take the only item she saved, a quilt made by her daughters. She refused to
give it up even when the Tories wounded her horse.
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| Colonel Elijah Clark |
Although Hannah followed her
husband’s troops in the eleven-day, 1780 civilian exodus to safety on North
Carolina’s Watauga River, she returned to Georgia with him before war’s end.
Hannah was said to be with Col. Clark when the British surrendered at the
second siege of Augusta. She lived to see her son John, who had fought
alongside his father, twice become governor of Georgia.
