Born to slave parents, Dinah Clark sawed her way to fame in 19th century Reading

Feb. 26—Itinerant sawyer Dinah Clark sawed her way to local fame in 19th-century Reading.

Carrying a buck on her shoulders and saw in hand, the tall, strong Black woman was a familiar figure in the city from the 1850s until her death in 1879.

"Her customers would bring boards and planks and sometimes fallen tree limbs out to the curb where she would set up shop," Barbara R. Goda wrote in the winter 2004-05 issue of the Historical Review of Berks County.

She also was hired to cut down specific trees in clients' gardens and yards, Goda said, and once, was severely injured when a tree fell on her.

Goda, who died in 2010, researched Dinah while writing the two-volume collection of women's stories "The Ladies of Reading Town and Beyond."

"She never learned to read or write, but through her jaunts around town, she gathered a great deal of daily news and was considered well-informed and quite intelligent," Goda wrote.

Many of Dinah's contemporaries worked as cooks, housekeepers, washerwomen and nannies. Dinah tried such domestic jobs, too, as well as whitewashing and carrying coal, but she could earn more cutting wood, the Reading Eagle noted on April 14, 1907.

"She could saw and split two and one-half cords of wood a day, for which she was paid a dollar and a half," the Eagle reporter wrote. "She generally received 25 cents for washing clothes for a family or whitewashing."

Her $1.50, about $42 in today's currency, was typical of the lower-scale wages earned by a common laborer, but barely enough for Dinah, a widow, to live on.

Free but indentured

Dinah earned her reputation as a hard worker long before she learned the trade that brought her acclaim.

Born about 1794 to parents enslaved on the Gabriel Hiester farm in Bern Township, she was technically free under Pennsylvania's gradual emancipation act of 1780. However, she was required by that law to work as an indentured servant until reaching the age of 28.

The Hiester farm, the childhood home of author Joseph J. Swope and subject of his 2016 book "Pleasant Valley Lost," was condemned for the federal Blue Marsh Dam project.

Hiester, a Revolutionary war militia colonel and state legislator, was a prosperous farmer and miller. The mill he built at the edge of the farm was later expanded as Pleasant Valley Roller Mills, Swope said.

Dinah remembered Hiester as "a good-natured man when he wasn't intoxicated," and called Mrs. Hiester "a splendid woman" and "very kind to the poor people," according to an undated clipping from the Reading Eagle, as cited by Goda.

Dinah's early memories were hazy. She was uncertain of her age, but remembered her parents were slaves and their surname was Bell.

She recalled how she and the other servants and slaves were fed only rye bread "as black as a hat," a few potatoes and cheese mixed with water. They had only rye coffee without milk or cream to drink.

"You didn't see an ounce of butter on the table in two years," she told the Eagle, according to Goda.

Even as a young child, Dinah, sometimes called Diana, was forced to do heavy farm chores.

"She described hoeing corn and potatoes, weeding, pitching hay and grain, spreading manure, picking stone from the fields, thrashing grain with a flail on the floor of the barn, and carrying bags of grain into the granary," Goda wrote.

One of her most distasteful tasks was toting bags of lime from the kiln. The powdery lime would filter through the bag carried on her back, irritating and burning her skin.

Life in Reading

When Hiester sold her indenture to his brother-in-law Jacob Seltzer for $100, Dinah moved to Seltzer's farm near Womelsdorf. Later, when he opened an inn, carrying water, cooking, housekeeping and other duties at the inn were added to her farm chores.

Seltzer later transferred Dinah's indenture to ironmaster Samuel Jones of Heidelberg Township in payment of a debt. Jones was a harsh master, who beat the young woman with a cowhide whip.

While working for him, she met and married William Clark and earned her freedom. The couple lived for a time on a Bern Township farm, then moved to Reading, where William, a sawyer and wood cutter, taught her the trade.

The Clarks helped found the now-shuttered Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, 119 N. 10th St., and several of their children were baptized there. Some of them, and later William, were buried in the adjacent churchyard. Only four of their 11 children, Mary Ann, Hannah, John and Silas William, survived to adulthood.

Bethel A.M.E. was a pillar of the Black community for more than 160 years and a testament to the hard work and accomplishments of free Blacks in Reading during the era of slavery.

The church was built using the private contributions of its congregation, many of whom were employed in Reading's iron industry, according to the National Park Service's website.

During the years leading up to the Civil War, the congregation was active in the Underground Railroad, and the Clarks might have helped harbor fugitive slaves escaping northward.

Both worked hard, supporting themselves and their children with various jobs in addition to sawing wood. But William fell deeply into debt. So in 1847, when Dinah bought a log house on Hinnershitz Alley for $200, about $5,500 today, it was deeded to her in trust of her daughter Hannah and son-in-law Enoch Sanders. A provision was included to prevent its seizure by William's creditors.

Her home on the alley, which runs east from Moss Street to 10th Street between Washington and Walnut streets, was less than a block from her church.

After William Clark died sometime in the early 1850s, Dinah turned to wood sawing as her primary job.

She wandered six days a week to private homes and businesses where she sawed and split kindling for the fires used in heating, cooking, washing and other chores. The backbreaking labor earned Dinah barely enough to support herself and her disabled daughter Mary Ann Brown, who had separated from her husband.

Dinah Clark died on April 12, 1879, of Bright's disease, an obsolete name for types of kidney disease frequently associated with diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure. She was thought to have been 84 or 85.

Her name was included by the Reading Times on a list of notables who died that year.

About 200 people, 75 of them white, attended Dinah's funeral, the Eagle reported five days after her death. Her remains are at Charles Evans Cemetery, 1119 Centre Ave., in an unmarked grave on the Aaron and William Still lot.