Mary Jane (Alexander) Clough, the daughter of pioneers Thomas M. and Catharine (Scott) Alexander, was born on November 22, 1852, in Brown County, Illinois. She moved with her family to Prescott in 1864. The Alexander family was one of the first to settle in the area.
Mary married Alfred Sumner Clough on April 13, 1874, in Yavapai County, Arizona Territory. The Cloughs had two children: Frank Sumner, born December 28, 1875, and died December 21, 1892, of heart disease and Norah Hartzell, born April 1, 1878, who is also represented in the Territorial Women’s Memorial Rose Garden.
The Cloughs had an orchard at Point of Rocks and a home in Prescott. A. S. Clough, according to the September 1898 Arizona Weekly Journal Miner, "opened my fruit stand at the old place in basement of #122 Montezuma and will sell apples by the box, barrel or pound at 3-5 cents... orders of 25 cents or more delivered."
Mary Jane died in Los Angeles, California, on February 22, 1903, where she had gone to secure the removal of a tumor; her death occurred from the effect of the operation. She was buried in Citizens' Cemetery near her son. Museum founder Sharlot Hall wrote her obituary, which was published in the Weekly Arizona Journal-Miner on April 15, 1903, and entitled “An Easter Memorial.” Sharlot recalled Mary: “Quiet and retiring as she always was she yet drew around her a circle of warm friends who one and all felt the influence of her kindly, earnest nature and found help and inspiration in her keen and sympathetic interest. Her memory was a storehouse of incidents interwoven with the early history of Prescott and the surrounding section, and she appreciated as few have done the importance of preserving the fast fading record of those first years.” Photos of Mary and the ranch were donated to the Sharlot Hall Museum. The Clough family Bible is also part of the Clough Collection in the Archives.
Sharlot Hall also wrote about Mary’s journey to the Arizona Territory with her family: “There were twelve families in the party when they reached Big Bend on the Arkansas river and learned that the northern route to California which they had meant to take was no longer safe by reason of hostile Indians. So they turned southward to Santa Fe, meaning to go on from there to California. There was no thought of stopping in the scarcely organized territory which had a year before been set off from New Mexico. Nine tenths of Arizona was still marked ‘unexplored’ on the map and Prescott consisted of a governor’s proclamation and a few log houses when the caravan of ox teams wound in along the old government road bringing with its dozen families thirty children, of which the twelve year old Mary Alexander was one.”
Donor: Norah Hartzell, daughter
Photo Located: RGC MS-39, Box C, F-Clough, Mary Jane
Updated: 10/28/2015, D. Sue Kissel
