The Clark House was home to four brothers who served in the Confederate army, reflecting the service of many of Sumner County’s young men. After their father, William F. Clark, a Protestant minister, died in 1847 at age forty-one, their mother, Emma Douglass Clark, raised the boys. Emma was the daughter of Reuben and Elizabeth Edwards Douglass and the granddaughter of Col. Edward and Sarah George Douglass, who came to Sumner County in the late 1700s. Three of the brothers died in service: Pvt. Edward Clark of Co. C, 7th Tennessee Infantry, was killed at the Second Battle of Manassas on August 27, 1862, at age eighteen; Pvt. David Fulton Clark of Co. F, 30th Tennessee Infantry, was killed on May 12, 1863, at the Battle of Raymond, Mississippi; and Pvt. Reuben Douglas Clark of Co. C, 7th Tennessee Infantry, died of wounds suffered during Gen. John Bell Hood’s retreat from Nashville in 1864. The fourth brother, Pvt. Charles Clark, survived the war after enlisting in 1862 and receiving his discharge in 1865 from the 19th and 20th Consolidated Tennessee Cavalry in Gen. Tyree H. Bell’s brigade of Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s command. Incorporated within the walls of the log house is a single room built in 1787 that served as the first Sumner County Courthouse, where Andrew Jackson appeared in court as attorney general for the Mero District.