Clark Mills was born on December 13, 1810, in Onondaga County, New York. At the age of five, upon his father's death, he was placed with an uncle, from whom he ran away eight years later because of real or fancied ill-treatment. Thereafter, he made his own way.
Mills worked as a farmhand, at scant wages not always paid; at times he attended school in winter. He hauled lumber in Syracuse, but when oxen were supplied instead of horses, he found life too slow and went to work on the canal. Later, while cutting cedar posts in a swamp, he froze his feet and for months could wear no shoes. Seeking lighter labor, he worked with a cabinet-maker, at first for instruction, afterward for board. He spent two years as millwright's apprentice, for a time was employed in plaster and cement mills, and then drifted to New Orleans, Louisiana. After a year there, he passed to Charleston, South Carolina, where he worked in stucco until 1835. In that year, he began modeling busts in clay. His experiences from 1828 to 1835 had developed all his native hardihood, versatility, and inventiveness. He next discovered a new method of taking casts from the living face, which gained him considerable work in portraiture, then he studied marble-cutting. In Carolina marble he carved a bust of John C. Calhoun. It was bought by the city council of Charleston and in 1846 won for Mills a gold medal, grandiloquently inscribed in Latin and in English. He was offered means for study abroad by certain well-to-do men of the city but he declined because of work offered at home. John S. Preston, who had befriended the sculptor Powers, invited him to Columbia, South Carolina, where he made ten busts, to be cut in marble after further study in art. William C. Preston suggested that before going abroad, Mills should see the statuary in Washington, D. C. , and paid the expenses of the round trip; he also gave Mills orders for two busts, those of Webster and of Crittenden. On his travels Mills stopped at Richmond, Virginia, and there studied Houdon's "Washington, " the first statue he had ever seen. As to Greenough's "Washington, " in the guise of the Olympian Zeus, he pronounced the anatomy perfect, but the treatment lacking in historical truth. He resolved that should he himself have a statue to make, "the world should find fault for his giving too much truth, and not for want of it". His opportunity came in 1848, when Cave Johnson, president of the Jackson monument committee, proposed that before going to Europe the young man should make a design for an equestrian monument to General Jackson. Mills had never seen either Jackson or an equestrian statue and at first refused. Nevertheless, the thought took possession of him and after nine months of study he produced a small model in which the hind feet of the horse came well under the center of the group, thus giving a lifelike effect of perfect balance entirely satisfactory to the committee.
A contract for twelve thousand dollars was made, the committee to furnish the bronze. After two years of strenuous labor, the full-size plaster model was finished; for the bronze, Congress appropriated cannon captured by Jackson. Then appeared the true magnitude of the task. The industry of bronze casting was almost unknown in the United States and never before had so large a piece been undertaken in the country. After seemingly insuperable difficulties had been overcome, largely through the resourcefulness and pertinacity of the sculptor, the pioneer equestrian statue emerged in bronze. Dedicated in January 1853, on the thirty-eighth anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, it still stands in Lafayette Square across from the White House in Washington, indulgently viewed by sophisticates who perceive its lack of sculptural dignity, but perhaps overlook its pioneer importance. Congress now voted to Mills an additional twenty thousand dollars, doubtless well earned; it also awarded him a fifty-thousand-dollar contract for an equestrian statue of Washington for the capital city and in 1860 commissioned him to cast in bronze Crawford's colossal "Liberty" for the Capitol dome. The city of New Orleans ordered a replica of the "Jackson. " With these projects assured, Mills bought land three miles from Washington and there erected a suitable studio and foundry. A gale wrecked the studio, a fire destroyed the foundry, but both were soon rebuilt. The New Orleans replica was dedicated in 1856, the "Washington" in 1860, and the "Liberty" in 1863. The "Washington" lacks interest and is without even such unity of design as may be descried in the "Jackson, " a third replica of which was erected in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1880. Other works by Mills are numerous portrait busts; the Corcoran Gallery owns his "Calhoun" and his "Washington. " His final undertaking was an enormous design for a Lincoln monument, to include thirty-six heroic figures, equestrian and pedestrian. The project fell into oblivion after his death at Washington in 1883.
Mills pioneered the first versions of free standing bronze equestrian statues. On January 8, 1853, the 38th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, he unveiled the equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson in Lafayette Park, Washington D. C. He also sculptured the equestrian statue of George Washington in Washington Circle and the bronze Statue of Freedom which sits atop the United States Capitol building. After the Civil War in 1865, Mills made a life-cast of President Abraham Lincoln's head. The liberty ship USS Clark Mills was named in his honor during World War II.
Mills was married and had two sons, and a step-daughter. One of his sons, Theodore Augustus, was a sculptor of talent who died in 1916.
