A lecture on N.C. Civil War Gov. Henry T. Clark will be held at 1:30 p.m. July 28 in Rocky Mount at the Braswell Memorial Library, 727 North Grace St.
The speaker will be R. Matthew Poteat, an assistant professor of history at Central Virginia Community College in Lynchburg. Poteat has written articles and reviews for a variety of scholarly journals and online publications and is the author of “Henry Toole Clark: Civil War Governor of North Carolina.”
The N.C. Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy Sesquicentennial Committee is sponsoring lectures throughout the state during each year of the observance.
The series began in Salisbury in 2011 on May 20, the date North Carolina left the Union in 1861 under Gov. John W. Ellis of Salisbury. The lectures are free and open to the public.
Poteat spoke at the 2009 Salisbury Confederate Prison Symposium on Clark during whose administration the Confederate government established the military prison at Salisbury.
Henry Toole Clark was born in Tarboro in 1808. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a bachelor’s degree followed by a master’s degree several years later. He served several terms in the state Senate and was speaker of the Senate in 1861 when Ellis of Salisbury died on July 7.
Clark served out the unexpired term of Ellis but chose not to run for the governorship in August 1862, when Zebulon B. Vance was elected. Clark died April 14, 1874, and was buried in the Calvary Episcopal Church Cemetery in Tarboro.
Poteat has written the only biography on Clark.
It was during Clark’s administration that Salisbury was selected as the site for a Confederate Prison. Clark appointed Dr. Braxton Craven as the first commandant at the prison.
Craven was the president of Trinity College, which would later become Duke University. Craven and a group of his students, known as the Trinity Guards, assumed their duties at the prison by Dec. 2, 1861.
Poteat is a native of Lenoir County and holds degrees from both East Carolina University and N.C. State University. He is currently writing his doctoral dissertation — a study of the Confederate governors — for the University of London, Birkbeck.
For more information contact N.C. Division Sesquicentennial Committee Chairman Sue Curtis at 704-637-6411, or southpaws@ fibrant.com.