JOHN CLARK, father of WILLIAM JONES
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“JOHN McMILLAN The Apostle of Presbyterianism in the West (1952)
1753-1833
By Dwight Raymond Guthrie
University of Pittsburgh Press
Copyright 1952
The book written by DWIGHT R. GUTHRIE, December, 1951 is an excellent book.
Pg. 104 (actual page in book)
JOHN CLARK (1718-1797)
JOHN CLARK came to live in western Pennsylvania when he was 63.He may have visited in the year before.Probably he was born in New Jersey.He was graduated from Princeton in 1759, licensed to preach in May a year later, and the next April ordained as an evangelist by the Presbytery of New Brunswick.For twenty years he was in New Jersey, Maryland, Eastern Pennsylvania, and New York, either as an evangelist or as a minister ina series of congregations... CLARK had become a member of Redstone Presbytery and had been installed as pastor (May, 1783).At Bethel he was minister until April 1794, three years before his death.He is buried in the churchyard there, beside his wife MARGARET, who died in 1807 and who, if the epitaph has been read correctly, was born in 1729.
JOHN and MARGARET CLARK, so it seems, had no children.In 1779, however, while they were still in Maryland, they took into their a family a Welsh boy of four and a half, WILLIAM JONES, whose father had been killed that year in the battle of Stony Point and whose mother had died.CLARK was then 61.When they came to Bethel the boy was about 7; he was 23 when CLARK died sixteen years later.CLARK left him all or part of his library and money for his education.WILLIAM JONES studied at Canonsburg Academy, taught school in Pittsburgh, in 1804, came back to Canonsburg for his theology, was licensed in 1808 and ordained by the Presbytery of Lancaster on the day after his twenty-six birthday on December 26, 1809.He served in the ministry about 59 years after he was licensed.Into his eighties, he was active in the Presbytery of Columbus, Ohio.He lived a long life of more than ninety years; and it was written of him sixty-five years ago, he lived “in favor with God and man - a laborious worker, a faithful and acceptable preacher.”Like CLARK, “He had considerable skill in sacred music and was fond of teaching it to his young people, and was revered and loved by them accordingly.”Six of his twenty children became doctors; one became a minister.His life and CLARK’S cover almost 150 years, from the time the thin crescent of Penn’s Settlements edged the lower Delaware until the time when three million people made (pg. 106) up the commonwealth of Pa., and the Pacific Ocean bounded the U. S. three thousand miles west of Delaware.