The Loyalist Collection

In 1775, Dr. Joseph Clarke (1732-1811) and his family were living in Stratford,Connecticut, where he owned several parcels of land and practised physic and surgery. He was the son of Isaac Clarke and his second wife Martha Bostwick. Dr. Nehemiah Clarke (c.1739-1825), a Loyalist who was tortured by a rebel mob, was a brother. On 27 October 1760, Dr. Joseph Clarke and Isabella Elizabeth Alleyne were married at Braintree, near Boston. Their oldest daughter Sarah Hannah Clarke married Jeremiah Smith Boies of Milton, whose family remained sympathetic to the rebel cause, yet this did not appear to alter the close family ties with the Loyalist family who came to New Brunswick. A younger daughter, Isabella Elizabeth Clarke (1767-1859), and the woman associated with the Clarke and Gamble manuscripts, was her mother's namesake. She was born in Stratford, Connecticut, and married in Maugerville, New Brunswick, to Dr. John Gamble (c.1755-1811) on 18 May 1784 by Rev. John Sayre. Dr. John Gamble was a native of Ireland who had come to New York in 1779 and served as a surgeon in a British military hospital in New York before joining the Queen's Rangers. Dr. Joseph Clarke, Isabella's father, also served as a doctor during the war. Because of his Loyalist ties, he had been persecuted and his property confiscated and sold, causing him to flee with his family to Lloyd's Neck on Long Island in 1777 and join the British troops. He recruited men for the Prince of Wales Volunteers and served as physician to the refugee Loyalists on Long Island until the end of the war. When the Loyalists were being evacuated from New York, Dr. Clarke was placed in command of Company 9 on the vessel, Bridgewater, as part of the June fleet. Eventually, the family settled at Maugerville, New Brunswick, where Dr. Clarke resumed his medical practice. Isabella Clarke and her husband, John Gamble, settled first in Parr Town (Saint John), then in Prince William, New Brunswick, but in 1796 Dr. Gamble journeyed by canoe and on foot to Niagara, Upper Canada, where he became the assistant surgeon of the reorganized Queen's Rangers. In 1798, Isabella Gamble with her five daughters between six and thirteen years of age, her sister Jane who later married Col. Samuel Smith of the Queen's Rangers, her father, Dr. Clarke, and Indian guides, made an incredibly difficult journey by canoe and batteaux from Maugerville, New Brunswick, to York (Toronto) where her husband, now a full surgeon, was located with the Queen's Rangers. The government of Upper Canada, under Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, had relocated to York from Niagara in 1794. With the disbanding of the Queen's Rangers in 1802, the family moved to Kingston, Ontario, and Dr. Gamble practised medicine in that town. He died on 2 September 1811 at the age of 56. Isabella moved to Toronto in 1820 where several of her thirteen children were located. She lived there for many years, and died at the residence of her son-in-law Thomas William Birchall on 9 March 1859 at the age of 92.