Elizabeth Hodges Clark

[1][2] Miss Clark's career began when, at age eighteen and without any previous scientific credentials, she was offered and accepted a job at the MCZ sorting marine specimens under the supervision of naturalist Theodore Lyman.

[6] Nor was the exchange of letters limited to Agassiz for, being de facto head of the MCZ in his absence, Miss Clark wrote regularly to the aforementioned William Brewster, who in 1885 was made museum's curator of mammals and birds.

[7] Evidence of this respect was made clear beyond the written word when, in the late 1890s, Agassiz offered to furnish a home for her in Newport, Rhode Island where he lived so that she would be on hand during the summer months.

[10][6] Elizabeth Hodges Clark's private affairs are largely unknown, yet, per census records and despite ignorance regarding her exact salary, it is known that her key position at Harvard allowed her to become her family's breadwinner, supporting her widowed mother and the four children of her siblings, with enough extra to hire a pair of servants in her Garden Street home in Cambridge, MA.

"[12] The money Agassiz left her in her will permitted the also described "very quiet and unassuming" Elizabeth Hodges Clark to "retire comfortably and, for the first time, to have her activities noted in the gossip pages of regional papers like the Boston Daily Globe.