Alfred Corning Clark inherited a 37.5% stake in the company, and invested the profits in New York City real estate.

[5] Clark served in the U.S. Army during World War I, attaining the rank of lieutenant-colonel and was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.

[5] He offered his late brother Edward's country estate to the New York State Historical Association, which moved its headquarters to Cooperstown in 1939.

[6] He founded the Farmers' Museum in 1942, which features a large collection of farm tools and equipment housed in Edward's former dairy barn.

After six years as a widow, his mother married Bishop Henry Codman Potter (1834–1908), of the Episcopal Diocese of New York, on October 4, 1902.

On February 20, 1909, Clark married Susan Vanderpoel Hun (1889–1967), the daughter of an Albany lawyer and a family friend since childhood.

Sterling, who was childless and had married his long-term French mistress in 1919, sought to change the terms of the trust to make her a beneficiary.

The foundation currently funds local museums, libraries, community organizations and village services, supports the summer Glimmerglass Opera Festival, and provides college scholarships for area students.

It also operates the Clark Sports Center in Cooperstown,[16] a vast athletic facility that is also used by the Baseball Hall of Fame for its annual induction ceremonies.

[22] As a young man, he helped to organize the 1913 Armory Show, and purchased the most expensive sculpture in the exhibition: Wilhelm Lehmbruck's Standing Woman (later donated to MoMA).

The 40 paintings he left to Yale also included works by Frans Hals, Van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer and George Wesley Bellows.

Pierre Konowaloff, heir to the estate of his great-grandfather Ivan Morozov, alleged in the suit that the painting had been illegally taken by the Soviet government in 1920.

[31] Konowaloff's suit argued that Yale should have questioned the propriety of Clark's purchase (76 years earlier), and that the court could not deem the university to be the painting's rightful owner.

"[32] Konowaloff filed a similar lawsuit against the Metropolitan Museum of Art, seeking the return of Paul Cézanne's 1891 portrait of his wife—a 1960 bequest by Clark to the Met.