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Among the last thoughts of
fifty-year-old Edward E. Clarke (b.1853) may have
been the irony of a fire insurance underwriter dying
in a fire.
It is unknown if Edward attended Mr. Bluebeard
with a family member or friends. It appears that
none of his family died at the Iroquois. His family
consisted of his wife, Wisconsin native, Hannah
"May" D. Davis Clarke (1860-1941), and three
children, including one from his first marriage. The
children were twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth Adele
Clarke (1879-1905) from Edward's marriage to
Elizabeth Perot Hallowell (1854-1883),
fifteen-year-old Dorris Clarke (1888-1983), and
thirteen-year-old Maynard Edward Clarke
(1890-1978).*
A native of New York, Clarke was an attorney and
manager for Chicago Fire Underwriters and Reliable
Fire Underwriters insurance. If his son and grandson
resembled him, Edward was of medium height with dark
brown hair and blue or hazel eyes.
The Clarke family lived at 5432 Lexington Ave. He and
had May married in 1887, a second marriage for Edward.
His first wife, four years gone, most probably from
childbirth complications, had been the sister of one of
Edward's partners in the insurance business,
Marshall Tyson Hallowell.
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Edward's body was taken to Perrigo's mortuary and interment was at Oakwoods
Cemetery. His first wife was buried in New Jersey.
Coincidentally, Clarke's business partner, Charles
C. Reed, died a month before the Iroquois fire after
being thrown from a horse. Reed had retired from the
Illinois Trust & Savings Bank prior to joining
Clarke in an underwriting firm.
In the years after the fire
Edward's oldest daughter, Elizabeth Adele Clark, who
went by Adele, did not marry. She died in 1905 at
age twenty-six and was buried in Oakwoods next to
her father. His second daughter, Dorris, married
four years after her father's death, and had a
child, Eugene. The marriage didn't last and she
remarried in 1920. She, her second husband, and her
mother, May, ended up in Spokane, WA. Son Maynard
Clarke married, had two children, operated a sewing
machine store in Spokane and eventually relocated
his family to Hawaii.
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