They then moved to Philadelphia in January 1837, where Enoch and his brother-in-law, Edward Dodge, founded the banking firm E. W. Clark & Co. later that year.
[3] That firm did well, earning enough to pay off the debts in seven years, then to propel the Clarks to a place among the city's wealthiest families.
[4] The firm opened branches in New York, St. Louis, and New Orleans, and made considerable money performing domestic exchanges in the wake of the 1836 revocation of the charter of the Second Bank of the United States and the Panic of 1837.
[7] Clark was instrumental in developing West Philadelphia,[1] which was transformed over the 19th century from an area of farmland and light industry to a streetcar suburb.
Clark bought land from various sellers, including Nathaniel B. Browne, a lawyer and landowner who had developed West Philly's first residential blocks in the 1850s.
The three-story brownstone mansion, built at a cost of $300,000, included "hardwood floors; hand-carved mahogany paneling, six feet high around the rooms; stained glass windows, said by art dealers to be matchless"; wallpaper "hand painted by a Japanese"; an $1,800 chandelier, a $2,000 mantelpiece, mosaic tiling, radiant heat from hot water piped under the floors, a hydraulic elevator, and "secret vaults for the treasures of silver plate.
[13] As a developer, Clark took the rowhouse form that was becoming the standard dwelling and altered it by moving the buildings some 20 feet back from the street on their lots.
[14] In 1862, Clark helped found the Union League of Philadelphia, a patriotic society that survives today as a city club.
Clark and Co. acquire the 11-year-old Atlantic, Mississippi & Ohio Railroad, renaming it the Norfolk & Western Railway and taking a seat on the board of directors.
They had a son, Charles Motley Clark, who graduated from Harvard with a degree in manufacturing in 1901 and worked as an ambulance driver during World War I.