about thirty-five miles north of Boston in the year 1652.
Haverhill may be remembered as the village founded by eight men from Ipswich and four from Newbury, and which was so frequently attacked by Indians that fifty years after its settlement some argued for the abandonment of the place.
The Clarkes had no truck with this weakness, though Calvin long before had fallen with a flint-barbed arrow in him. His cabin had passed to his son Timothy; and when the Indians and French advanced on Haverhill, in Queen Anne's War, they burned the cabin and killed Timothy, but only after he had got his wife and seven children on their way into the town.
So there was another Calvin Clarke to return to the beautiful quiet bend of the river and to hew the beams and peg the wooden walls which, though originally raised in 1722, remain and are visible in the north wing of the present white-painted, square-pillared homestead. The ferry, which gave its name to the locality, was a much later affair, hardly pre-Revolutionary.
The Clarke who contrived the ferry for his own convenience also was named Calvin; and he served stubbornly and conscientiously with General Henry Knox and died of exposure in the winter of 1777. He had six sons and five daughters, and Jeremy, the third son, took to the law and became an advocate in Boston during John Adams' administration.
From that time there was always a lawyer in the Clarke connection and usually a son or two at Harvard studying for the law. They liked law, and they preferred, by tradition and temperament, that department of law which is shunned by commonplace men, by the mediocre and the money-seeking, and which therefore draws to itself the best and the worst of the legal profession—criminal law.
