Biography

George Hyde Clarke was a prominent English builder and the great grandson of colonial New York governor George Hyde Clarke. The junior Clarke commissioned the building of the Hyde Hall mansion in Otsego County, NY. Clarke married widow Ann Low Cary Cooper in 1814 and had four children with her. Though legally married to Ann, Clarke maintained a separate family in England, where he was married to Elizabeth Rochfort, an Irish woman who suffered from a serious mental condition, and no divorce record exists between them, suggesting that Clarke carried on both marriages simultaneously.