Edward O. Clark was born in June of 1918 in New York, but would spend most of his life in Chalfont, Pennsylvania. He spent the summer of 1939 working on a ferry on Narragansett Bay, which may have been the start of his lifelong love of ships. In 1940, upon graduating from Princeton University with a degree in mechanical engineering, Clark joined the newly established Steamship Historical Society of America. At this time, he considered his favorite steam vessels to be those from the Long Island Sound and Hudson River, such as the Robert Fulton, the New Yorker and the Conanticut, which had once been owned by the Jamestown & Newport Ferry Company that he had worked for the previous summer. Shortly after joining SSHSA, Clark served in WWII. When he returned, he began increasing his collection of 35mm slides, documenting the ships he encountered during his travels. The time he spent photographing tugs, ferries, and passenger and cargo steamers on the Delaware River and in New York Harbor as well as other waterways has preserved an abundance of maritime history. Clark served as editor-in-chief of Steamboat Bill from 1955-1960 and wrote two articles on the City Ice Boat No. 2, a sidewheel ice-breaker, his favorite steamboat of the time. Clark passed away in 1994.
This collection is available to the public by appointment at the Steamship Historical Society. Objects that are fragile, significant, or require additional tools to access may require archivist assistance.
Use, reproduction, and/or publication of archival material is prohibited without prior approval of the Steamship Historical Society. Fees and/or restrictions may apply. Please contact the SSHSA archivist, Astrid Drew, at adrew@sshsa.org for more information.
Edward O. Clark Collection, Steamship Historical Society of America Archives, www.sshsa.org.
The majority of the Edward O. Clark collection comprises photographs and color projection slides taken by Clark of the ships and harbors he encountered throughout his travels. They include his home regions of the Delaware River, Hudson River, and New York harbor, and distant locations such as the Great Lakes and Canada, where he took extensive pictures of bulk cargo carriers or “lakers,” ferries, and passenger vessels on and near the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Other areas of Clark’s interest are represented in this collection, such as railroads and gardening, as well as candid portraits of his family and friends. Additionally, this collection includes several boxes of prints, clippings, and ephemera collected by Clark over the years, with a focus on steamboats native to New England, New York, and international/foreign bodies of water.
This collection is arranged by series.
The Edward O. Clark Collection was purchased in the Fall of 1993 by the Steamship Historical Society. The collection was retroactively accessioned by Astrid Drew in October 2016.