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- The following account of Lardner Clark is found in an old history:
[Putnam, A. W., History of Middle Tennessee, page 174.\
"the name of 'Lardner Clark', merchant and ordinary keeper, may be placed at the head of the list of dealers in dry-goods, thimbles, and pins for ladies, & liquor for men, and provender for horses.
"The merchant-princes of our city, and the landlords of our hotels, need not be ashamed to be called 'successors of Hon'ble Lardner Clark' for he was Justice of the Peace also. Ten horses, packed with goods from Philadelphia, travelling by slow stage through the length of Virginia, and arrived at the Bluff in the fall of the year 1786, was a sight worth looking at, and proves that Nashville was not then 'a one-horse town'.
"We doubt if the Honorable Lardner Clark, in the half-dozen years in which he was in business, imported or sold a single dress of silk of satin. Cheap, plain chintzes and calicoes, and unbleached linens and coarse woolens, constituted the choice of the stock.
"for his imported goods the Merchant was glad to receive peltries; skins of all sorts and sizes, from buffalo bulls, the monster bears down to the spotted fawns and soft, fine velvet of the beaver and hare.
"We know not who was first adorned with an elegant, stiff brocade petticoat; that was a distinction among ladies who had little of price and envy. This however, we may assert of each and all of those who were here in the year of our Lord 1783; (and for several years thereafter) they were very glad to wear moccasins and leather aprons through the day, and to sleep wrapped up in a buffalo-robe and bear skin at night."
The following account of Lardner Clark's parentage has also been published:
[Tennessee Historical Magazine, Volume 3, 1917, p 28-50; & 115-133.]
"Thomas Clark, d. May 17, 1752, m. (1) Hannah, was a settler at Clark's Landing, on Little-Egg-Harbour, then Glouchester Co. where the family was the most conspicuous of the plantation owners of South Jersey. His son, Colonel Elijah Clark, a highly esteemed and prosperous business man in the County of Glouchester married 29 April 1756, Jane Lardner, a daughter of the Lardner family of Philadelphia.."
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