Jane Clark

The park was made possible by Benjamin L. Harvey, who left his estate to the Park District in 1933 to acquire playground acreage in the North End of Tacoma. Harvey’s will stipulated that the eventual park be named after his mother, Jane Clark Harvey. Mr. Harvey was an ardent advocate of parks and supported playgrounds for small children where they could play in a safe environment.

In 1936, the Park District bought property bounded by North 39^th street, Ferdinand street, and Orchard street, but serious work did not begin on park development until 1948. The second parcel that makes up the park was acquired from Pierce County in 1940.

An allocation from a 1952 tax levy supported by the North End Recreation Association (NERA) funded construction of the recreation building, and the wading pool was a gift from the Downtown Kiwanis Club. The park was formally dedicated in June of 1953. NERA continued to support the park, raising funds for the playground equipment and park benches through the 1960s.

Jane Clark Park’s ball fields continue to be extremely popular for baseball and soccer, and the playground remains an important family play spot for the neighborhood.

Benjamin Looker Harvey was born in Lafayette, Indiana on April 1, 1875, and came to Tacoma in the 1890s with his mother. His primary occupation was that of wholesale grocer, following in the footsteps of his father, Capt. C.O. Harvey, an ex-Union soldier formerly of Company B 40th Indiana Infantry, Indiana Volunteers. Captain Harvey passed away in 1887, and Benjamin and his mother moved to Tacoma a few years later. In the early 1900s Benjamin retired from the wholesale grocer business and pursued his hobbies, which included studying history and Native American culture.

Harvey was also an advocate for public park spaces in Tacoma. In 1930, the Young’s Man’s Business Club of Tacoma ran a contest for people to submit ideas of how the City of Tacoma should spend $150,000. Harvey proposed three stages of a plan to use the money: 1) Make sure the funds were safe; 2) buy a public park with $75,000 and then build a veterans monument with $50,000, 3) use the remaining money to buy land for future park development, and then build small playgrounds in all parts of the Tacoma so every section of the city would have “out-door pleasure grounds”. Upon his death, his bequest was read at the Park Board meeting in January 1933:

“For the information of the Board, the will of the late Benjamin L. Harvey, who died January 11th, was read. All household furniture was willed to the Indian Odd Fellows’ Home, two swords and such books as desired were left to the Ferry Museum or the Washington State Historical Society and the balance of the estate left to the Metropolitan Park District for the acquisition of a Public Playground for Children in the northern part of the city to be known as the Jane Clark Playground for Children.”

Benjamin Harvey lived at the family’s home at 2612 N Puget Sound Ave, and never married. When he passed away in 1933, the local newspaper ran a column mourning the loss of a “Tacoma writer” and booster. Harvey was a prolific letter writer who advocated for restoring the name “Mount Tahoma” and enjoyed using Chinook Jargon phrases in his quest to preserve local history. In 1930, he also wrote a letter to the Attorney General of the United States in support of Native American treaty rights. His writings called out the unjust practice of depriving local Indians of their right to fish in specific locations as promised in the treaties.

Benjamin Harvey’s mother, Jane Clark Harvey, passed away in 1903, and was an amateur scholar in her own right. In 1892 she presented a paper to the Tacoma Academy of Science (though we don’t know the topic on which she spoke). Before coming to Tacoma, she also wrote the history of St. John’s Episcopal Church in Lafayette, Indiana.

Benjamin Harvey not only wrote about Tacoma history, he also put his hand to creative writing, penning poetic descriptions of Tacoma as well as an unpublished manuscript imagining the travails of a family coming West on the Oregon Trail. In the 1930s, when work relief crews conducted improvements in Tacoma’s parks as part of the national response to the Great Depression, previously unemployed writers were also hired to summarize the history and condition of the parks. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) authors of the Jane Clark Park brief emphasized Harvey’s literary creativity, and reproduced

Excerpt from the end of an essay by Benjamin L. Harvey, accessed at the Washington State Historical Society Research Center March 24, 2022. ID: 1924.38.2

one of his poems in their notes:

“Washington, land of Beauty
Washed by the sunset sea,
Where each new morn
Splendor is born
Silvering lake and lea,
Where when twilight closes
The mountains are molten sun,
Garden of glorious roses,
Beautiful Washington.”