Photo by Milton Morris
Mable Owens Clarke
Claim to fame: Matriarch of Soapstone Baptist Church and the Liberia community in Pickens County.
Latest achievement: She was recently awarded the Order of the Palmetto, the state’s highest civilian honor, for her work creating the Soapstone Preservation Endowment (soapstonepe.org) and forever protecting the historic hilltop church from development.
Her secret weapon: Fried fish. For decades, Clarke hosted monthly fish fries that raised the money and community support needed to create a permanent conservation easement.
Words to live by: “We’re born in this world, not just to live for ourselves, but to give something back,” Clarke says. “That’s why I was challenged to do this.”
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For Mable Owens Clarke, promises made are promises kept.
When she was 17, her brother made her promise to continue her education if she moved north to escape the Jim Crow South of 1960. She studied business at multiple Boston institutions.
Clarke returned home 23 years later, when her aging father felt pressured to sell the family land in the Blue Ridge Foothills. She has been thwarting developers clamoring for the bucolic location ever since. A promise to her mom, days before her mother passed away, further inspired the decades-long effort to protect and sustain Soapstone Baptist Church, the anchor of the historic Liberia community.
“She said, ‘Do not let the doors of Soapstone Church close,’” recounts Clarke. “‘Out of all the children I got, I’m depending on you to do that.’”
Founded by Clarke’s great-grandfather, the original Soapstone Church was built by formerly enslaved African Americans who settled in northern Pickens County in 1865. Nearly a century later, when the Ku Klux Klan burned the church down, Clarke’s mother, Lula, sold produce from the family farm to help rebuild.
Lula Owens’ existential concern for her church was warranted. As the years passed, the population of Liberia dwindled and so did Soapstone’s congregation and finances. Outside developers’ desire for the six-acre property did not.
For 22 years, Clarke held monthly fish fries that served much more than her popular cornmeal-crusted flounder, drawing hungry supporters from all around and helping to keep the church’s doors open.
Still, it wasn’t until last year that Soapstone Baptist Church, named for a nearby rock formation, became permanently protected through a conservation easement. Upstate Forever and other conservation organizations worked closely with Clarke to finally ensure that the church, the adjacent one-room schoolhouse and the nearby slave cemetery will remain safe from future residential or commercial developments.
“When I signed that paper, I’m telling you, I sat there and I cried,” says Clarke. “I know that this church cannot be sold, it cannot be pushed over. They can’t do anything to it but come and enjoy it.”