Catherine (Kate) Pickens Upson was born in Alabama in 1851, to Edwin Upson and Priscilla Maxwell. She was raised in Charlemont, Massachusetts and graduated from Wheaton Female Seminary (now Wheaton College), Norton, Mass., in 1869. In 1874, she married Edward P. Clark, and they had three sons, Charles, John and George. She contributed articles and columns to periodicals including Godey's Magazine, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Herald, Harper's and various children's magazines. She was editor of the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Good Cheer Magazine, and eventually the New York Evening Post. She published several books (mostly children's), short stories, and a novel.

After her husband's death in 1903, Kate Clark lectured extensively throughout U.S. on popular, cultural, literary, and political subjects including suffrage. She resided in New York City and was active in the suffrage and temperance movements, and founded the Brooklyn's Women's Republican Club. She taught courses on lecturing at Columbia University and was a trustee of Wheaton College from 1907 until her death in 1935.

[See also Clark Family Tree in reading room]

The Kate Upson Clark Papers include diaries, correspondence, published and unpublished writings (including notes, articles, lectures, and poems), biographical material and memorabilia. Correspondence from and to family, friends, and students includes intimate letters (1914-22) to her sister, Mary Upson Avery, covering personal, family, occupational, and financial matters, and including references to her activities as a Trustee of Wheaton College, persons of varying importance met through lecture engagements, and glimpses into the careers of her sons, Charles Upson and John Kirkland Clark. Her unpublished manuscript, "The Affair of William Strickland & Co.," is an account of charges of "Abolitionist connivance" brought by the booksellers' business in Mobile, Alabama in which her father Edwin Upson, a native of Connecticut, was an associate. Other writings include composition books (1862-67); diaries she kept as an adolescent and young woman (1862-68, 1888); and extensive notes on a European trip (1923-25).

Please use the following format when citing materials from this collection:

Kate Upson Clark Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass.

The Kate Upson Clark Papers were donated to the Sophia Smith Collection by her son, Charles Upson Clark, circa 1950 and 1961.

Finding aid revised by Margaret Jessup, 2005.