Background on Charles Wellington Clapp
MAC Class of 1886, on entrance
Charles Wellington Clapp was born on Jan. 4, 1863, to Richard and Eunice Amelia (Slate) Clapp, the youngest of their six children, one of whom died as an infant. Both of Clapp's parents had been teachers, but now the family farmed in Montague, Mass. Clapp arrived at Massachusetts Agricultural College in the fall of 1882, an enthusiastic member of the class of '86. His college career was a full one: he served as editor-in-chief of the 1886 Index (the MAC yearbook published by the junior class in January 1885) and was also involved in many college clubs and organizations, including the College Shakespearian Club, the College Christian Union, the Washington Irving Literary Society, the Natural History Society, the Rifle Association, the Sporting Club, football, and baseball. He was involved in music, singing first bass in the Howlers and playing guitar in the orchestra. During his senior year, he was class historian, and he was second-place winner of the Grinnell Agricultural Prize and the Hills Botanical Prize. One of just a dozen members of the class of 1886 to graduate, Clapp and eight of his classmates returned to campus in 1936 for their fiftieth class reunion, at the time a near-record for a fiftieth-reunion turnout at the college.
Clapp worked as a civil engineer for rail companies in Greenfield and Northampton, and later in Tampa, Fla., and Utica, N.Y., and was married three times. On April 12, 1894, he married Evelyn A. Metcalf in Providence, Rhode Island, with whom he had two children, Alfred, who died in 1898 at age 3, and Roger, born in 1899. Evelyn died in 1902 at the age of 40 from uremia. Clapp's second marriage, on October 18, 1905, was to Julia Marie Robbins, who died in 1932. He then married Clara J. Wetherbee. Clara J. Clapp died on January 31, 1947, at age 73, and Charles a little more than a month later, on March 5, both in Utica.
