Initially started in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to provide educational opportunities for immigrants' children, the order relocated in the 1840s to Dubuque, Iowa, and established prairie schools across the high plains.

[1] In 1831, she and three other women who had joined the Third Order of St. Francis, decided to live together and the following year, they opened a school, which they named Miss Clarke's Seminary.

[1] The five women, Clarke, Catherine Byrne, Eliza Kelly, Margaret Mann, and Rose O'Toole decided to emigrate to Philadelphia to teach the children of Irish immigrants.

Because of an accident, they lost their money and had to depend on a stranger to help with their passage and Father Terence Donaghoe, to help them rent space once they arrived in Pennsylvania.

[3] Though teaching among the native tribes never materialized, the women had established a school for settlers' children, called St. Mary's Academy[4] by the beginning of July.

[3] On the 15 September 1877, Pope Pius IX issued the Decree of Approbation[5] giving the order a temporary approval good for six years.

[9] At the time that she died, Clarke and the order she had established had founded schools in 23 towns in Iowa, in Wisconsin, Chicago, Wichita and as far west as San Francisco.