Photo: Agness Booth Clardy /
While working on my Haywood County Booth family line, I ran across an interesting obituary that deserved a closer look. The subject was Agness Booth Clardy (1755-1847), my fifth great-aunt.
Clardy is interesting because she was born when Virginia was still a British colony. She joined the Methodist church the same summer the colonies declared independence. She lived through the Revolutionary War, the early republic, the expansion of settlement into Tennessee and the rise of Methodism from a small movement into one of the largest Protestant denominations in America.
Clardy was a daughter of John Booth (1735-1807) and Mary Smith Booth (about 1730-before 1807), my sixth great-grandparents and was raised in Amelia County, Virginia.
When she was only 15, she married Benjamin Clardy on June 25, 1771, and soon after, began her faith journey as a member of the new religion called Methodism.
Along with the family of her brother—who was my fifth great-grandfather—Stephen Shaybe Booth (1765-1832), Agnes and Benjamin migrated and helped settle Pendleton District, South Carolina.
Eventually, they were the parents of at least five sons and six daughters that have been identified. In 1816, they moved again, this time to Franklin County, Tennessee. By then, Tennessee had become a prime destination for families moving west in search of land, opportunity and new beginnings.
Benjamin died in September 1823, in Franklin at the age of 71, but was returned to South Carolina for burial. Agnes died nearly 25 years later, on Jan. 17, 1847 at age 91. She died in the home of her daughter and son-in-law, William Fariss.
From her obituary, we know she was a proud member of the first generation of American Methodists.
“Nearly seventy years I have been a dear lover and close attendant of class meetings and love-feasts, and expecting this to be the last I shall ever attend, I want to say that I am still bound to serve God till death; I want you all to pray God to assist me and meet me yourselves in heaven.” —Agness Booth Clardy
This memorial is supposedly located at “the old Spearman Family cemetery behind the post office in Piedmont, South Carolina.” You would think there would be a better photo of it online, but this seems to be it. If anyone wants to take one and send it to me, I will share it here.
John W. Spearman
The writer of her obituary was John W. Spearman (1813-1852), a Methodist minister who was born in South Carolina, licensed to preach in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1838 or 1839, ordained a deacon in 1843 and later ordained an elder. He died in Franklin County, Tennessee, only a few years after writing about Agness.
The “bro. Joseph Smith” named in Agness Booth Clardy’s obituary was likely Rev. Joseph Robert Smith (1791–1862), a Methodist Episcopal preacher active in the church during the 1840s. Genealogy records place Smith in the Franklin County region at the time of Clardy’s death. Methodist histories describe him as an experienced local preacher, useful itinerant and “powerful exhorter.”
George Shadford, a leader in the early Methodist denomination and contemporary of John Wesley.
The “Shadford” named in the obituary was almost certainly George Shadford (1739-1816), an English Methodist preacher sent to America in the years before the Revolution. Before his departure for the colonies, John Wesley himself gave George Shadford one famous admonition: “I let you loose, George, on the great continent of America. Publish your message in the open face of the sun, and do all the good you can.” 1 George Shadford obeyed and, as he preached in Virginia 1775 and 1776, a great revival broke out and Methodism spread rapidly through the colony reaching young Clardy.
Agness Booth Clardy clearly lived a full life and we should all be so blessed at the end of lived to be, as her obituary pointed out, “surrounded by children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and friends…deeply affected.”
For more of my genealogy research, visit rscottwilliams.info.
- John Wesley, “To Mr. George Shadford,” 1773, in The Works of the Reverend John Wesley, A.M., vol. 7, First American Complete and Standard Edition (New York: B. Waugh and T. Mason, for the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1835), 99-100. ↩︎
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