Thomas Clark, 101, Chronicler Of the History of Kentucky
By WOLFGANG SAXON
Published: June 30, 2005
Thomas D. Clark, a historian of the American frontier who was long the historian laureate of Kentucky, died on Tuesday in Lexington. He was 101.
His death was announced by his family and by Gov. Ernie Fletcher, who noted that the Kentucky History Center would be renamed for Dr. Clark, as planned, on his 102nd birthday, July 14.
Dr. Clark was named historian laureate for life in 1990. When he turned 100, news reports pointed out that he had been alive for nearly half of Kentucky's history as a state. He was putting the final touches on his memoir when a hip infection sent him to a hospital a few weeks ago.
Dr. Clark was author, co-author or editor of more than 40 books, starting with a history of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, in 1933. He taught at the University of Kentucky from 1931 until 1965, when he retired as chairman of the history department.
He polished the university's reputation as a repository of Southern history, though a good part of his work appeared, or was reissued in updated editions, after his retirement, including ''Kentucky,'' published in 1968 and again in 1992.
''The History of Kentucky,'' his 1937 textbook, which he wrote because he needed a text for his own classes, remains in print in a revised version.
Thomas Dionysius Clark was born in Louisville, Miss. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Mississippi in 1929 and received a master's degree at Kentucky in 1929 and his Ph.D. from Duke in 1932. Within 10 years, he had become a full professor at Kentucky, in the meantime acting as a guardian of the state's archives: in addition to persuading the governor to establish a Kentucky archive, he created a special-documents collection at the university's library.
Dr. Clark's first wife, Martha Turner Clark, died in 1995, after 62 years of marriage. He is survived by his second wife, Loretta Gilliam Clark; a son, Thomas B., of Lexington; a daughter, Elizabeth C. Stone of Bowling Green, Ky.; a brother, Ernest, of Dallas; and two sisters, Wilma Sanders and Ethel Atkinson, both of Louisville, Miss.