editor and publisher; born in Rockbridge Co., Virginia, his family went west in a mule wagon in 1857; he worked odd jobs across the Midwest before becoming a salesman of threshing machinery and farm equipment in 1870. Clarke moved to Madison in 1890 and, in 1898, became founding editor of The American Thresherman, a magazine devoted to farm equipment and its customers and dealers. He was known for his pithy aphorisms that expressed a Horatio Alger attitude, and for his philanthropy in Madison, which named a neighborhood park and beach for him after his death. View more information elsewhere at wisconsinhistory.org

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[Source: Milwaukee Sentinel, March 18, 1929]