The prime mover in the rescue of the Mark Twain House was Katherine Seymour Day, grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who in 1925 envisioned a literary center based in this neighborhood. She challenged the area’s increasing commercialization and formed a group called the Friends of Hartford to lobby the city government – “the local Tammany,” she called it, referring to New York’s notorious political club. A campaign was set up to raise money to buy the house, and the final price tag was $150,000, with a mortgage of $55,000.

Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch, Samuel Clemens’s sole surviving daughter, lent her acting talents to the cause in a stage production of her father’s Joan of Arc to raise money for the purchase and refurbishing of the house. Day and the Friends were victorious: on April 29, 1929, the General Assembly of the State of Connecticut issued a charter to the Mark Twain Memorial and Library Commission. Apartments remained on the upper floors, and the ground floor became the Mark Twain Branch of the Hartford Public Library for the next 26 years.

The women of the newly created Mark Twain Committee of the Friends of Hartford quickly moved into the first floor with examples of period furniture, old paintings and engravings, books by Mark Twain, and other memorabilia. The city library’s Mark Twain Branch opened on April 25, 1930, with a buffet and reception attended by Clemens’s surviving daughter, Clara, and her husband, Ossip Gabrilowitsch. She was a singer and he a pianist, and the evening before they had given a joint recital at the Horace Bushnell Memorial Hall to benefit the restoration of her childhood home.

The house had suffered hard use during its years as a school and apartment building. Every meeting of the Memorial’s trustees brought new reports of repairs needed. The electric wiring was deemed a menace, the roof and heating system needed repairs, the plumbing was bad, and a new boiler was needed. Mice, bats, and pigeons had taken up residence. The income from the rent paid by tenants and the library were not enough to keep the house in shape, let alone begin restoration.