Woman of the Century/Helen Taggart Clark

CLARK, Mrs. Helen Taggart, journalist, born in Northumberland, Pa., 24th April, 1849. She is the oldest of three children of the late Col. David Taggart and Annie Pleasants Taggart. She was educated in the Friends' central high school, in Philadelphia, Pa. In October, 1869, she made a six months' stay in Charleston, S. C, whither she went to make a visit to her father, then stationed in that city as paymaster in the United States army. Miss Taggart became the wife in 1870 of Rev. David H. Clark, a Unitarian minister settled over the church in Northumberland. Four years later they removed to New Milford, Pa., to take charge of a Free Religious Society there. In 1875 Mr. Clark was called to the Free Congregational Society in Florence, Mass. Attention was first drawn to "H. T. C ," by which some of her earlier work was signed, in 1880, by her occasional poems in the Boston "Index," of which her husband was for a time assistant editor, and in the Springfield " Republican." Her life, as she puts it, has been one HELEN TAGGART CLARK. of intellectual aspirations and clamorous dish-washing and bread-winning. Mrs. Clark left Florence in 1884. returning to her father's house in Northumberland with her youngest child, an only daughter, her two older children being boys. There for two years she was a teacher in the high school, varying her duties by teaching music and German outside of school hours, story and verse writing and leading a Shakespeare class In August, 1887. she accepted a position in the "Good Cheer" office, Greenfield, Mass., whence she was recalled to Northumberland the following February by the illness of her father. His illness terminated fatally a little later, since which time Mrs. Clark has made her home in her native town. Mrs. Clark has a large circle of friends, and her social duties take up much of her time, but she contrives to furnish a weekly column for the Sunbury "News," to perform the duties pertaining to her office as secretary of the Woman's Relief Corps in her town, to lead a young people's literary society, and to contribute stories and poems to Frank Leslie's papers, the "Christian Union. " the " Woman's Journal " and the Springfield "Republican."