Edith K. O. Clark

Republican • Sheridan
Superintendent of Public Instruction 1915-1919

Edith K.O. Clark was born in Washington, D. C., September 7, 1881, and educated in the schools of her native city. After the death of her father, General George W. Clark in 1898, she and her two siblings moved to Iowa to live with their uncle, James S. Clark. She studied at Grinnell College in Iowa and took coursework in library science at the University of Wisconsin.

She came to Wyoming May 1906 and secured a position as teacher in a rural school in Johnson County and later in Sheridan County. In November 1908, Clark was elected county superintendent of schools for Sheridan County and served for six years. During this time, she organized the first Sheridan County Association of school district trustees. In 1914, Clark was elected State Superintendent of Public Instruction on the Republican ticket, serving from January 4, 1915, until January 6, 1919. Clark was a member of the school code commission created by the Thirteenth State Legislature, which revised the school laws. The commission submitted to the following legislature in 1917 a plan to create a State Department of Education under a State Board of Education whose provisional qualifications were fixed by statute. This legislation was enacted in February 1917.

Not a candidate for re-election, Clark enlisted in the army in 1918 with the Y.W.C.A. for overseas duty as soon as her term of office had been completed. Upon returning from France in the fall of 1919, she became actively engaged for a while in Y.W.C.A. work in Mississippi. Clark returned to Cheyenne in September 1922, where she engaged in business for several years before returning to her ranch in Johnson County, near Buffalo. Clark died June 2, 1936, in Cheyenne and was interned there in Lakeview Cemetery.


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