Profile · Neenah, Wisconsin
Charles Benjamin Clark
Neenah mill founder; U.S. House 1887–91; father of Theda Clark, namesake of the city's hospital
$7,500
Charles Benjamin Clark was the Neenah mill founder who served two terms in Congress and whose daughter's will built the city's hospital. Born in Theresa, New York, on August 24, 1844, to Luther O. Clark and Theda Tamblin Clark, he came to Neenah with his widowed mother about 1855 and worked as a hardware clerk. In August 1862 he enlisted as a private in Company I of the 21st Wisconsin Infantry and came home a first lieutenant. In 1872 he put $7,500 into the Globe Mill with Kimberly, Babcock, and Shattuck. He was mayor of Neenah from 1880 to 1883, sat in the state Assembly, and held two Republican terms in the U.S. House from 1887 to 1891. He lost the 1890 race, went east to visit, and died of Bright's disease in Watertown, New York, on September 10, 1891, at forty-seven. He is buried at Oak Hill. His daughter Theda, born in 1871 and named for her grandmother, married a Goshen newspaperman, watched people die for want of a hospital, and left her brother instructions: if childbirth killed her, build one. She died on October 20, 1903, three days after delivering a daughter also named Theda. C.B. Clark Jr. put $96,000 toward Theda Clark Memorial Hospital, which opened on the child's sixth birthday, October 18, 1909, with twenty-five beds; ThedaCare's legacy page also notes another $50,000 for patients who could not pay. The building remains the city's hospital under a later name. The mill made the fortune. The hospital is what Neenah still points to when it tells the Clark story.