The Susan B. Clay Fund
Created: 1904
Purpose: Library
"Section 8 of Susan B. Clay Will. I give and bequeath unto said town of Jaffrey the sum of (2,000.00) to be held and invested by trustees chosen by said town and the income thereof expended in keeping my lot in Conant Cemetery and the grounds around said Library building in good order, the balance of said income not needed for those purpose [sic] to be used for the purchase of books for said library."
Biography of Susan B. Clay
Susan Bethiah Clay, the daughter of James and Rachel Prescott Clay, and granddaughter of that tall pine of the forest, Benjamin Prescott, was born in Rindge on a farm so near the Jaffrey border that in all but name it was a part of Jaffrey. The church affiliations of the locality were with Jaffrey; its children attended Jaffrey schools. And so she looked to Jaffrey as her home and to Jaffrey people as her people. She grew up in a home of singular retirement, where in her early days there was from her door the gleam of Contoocook water, and over the treetops the towering, unchanging, ever majestic peak of Monadnock.
The things that belonged to her ancestors belonged now to her. The Lord had not multiplied her kin in her home town of a hundred years. All that were left of them were scattered now or they were laid in seemly rows in the graveyard to wait the great awakening. They had labored faithfully to clear the earth that was given them. And now that her father was gone in middle age, her mother at ninety-one, full of years, her sister and companion in her middle years, and last of all her brother, the treasure they had laid up out of the labor of years was her sole charge to care for and bestow upon the world, so that it might give its increase to those who should come after and not be diminished. The thought of her stewardship was often upon her, and when the twilights were long and her eyes were weary with the day she thought of her trust as of an alabaster box for which she must now render the final account. There was in it the labor of the oxen that broke the stubborn glebe on her father's and her grandfather's farms. There was the work and conscientious care of her ancestors who had by labor of head or heart or hand added to the store that had grown little by little to a sum she could scarcely conceive. What could be better for a perennial spring that would bring rest to those whose work was done, and inspiration and the joy of endeavor to those who were young with the sterner duties of life still before them, than a library of useful books? Before her brother died she talked with him, and his thought was as her own. And so she made her Will and good neighbors and fellow townsmen witnessed it, and to the hands of two whom she had known in all the years of her life she entrusted her thought and the treasure of her heart. It was her alabaster box that she placed in their hands, with all the sacred memories and sacrifices it contained, out of which the house of her dreams was to be erected and its perennial fount of light and joy to those who should come be opened to the sky. And out of the alabaster box which she placed in their hands her administrators, by her will, built the house that the children now call the Library, as a place of refuge and a fountain of refreshment to all the coming years, and over its door where her name is carved in stone they might well have written of her, "Many daughters of Jaffrey have done virtuously, but thou excellest them all."
Source: Town History, vol I, p. 605