Katharine Seymour Day had impeccable Nook Farm lineage and was the child of Olivia’s good friend, Alice Hooker Day and her husband John Day. The Clemenses attended their wedding in 1869 and the newlyweds welcomed their daughter a year later. (The couple later rented the Clemens home while Samuel and Olivia were in Europe in the 1890s.) Katharine was the granddaughter of John and Isabella Beecher Hooker, and the great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Katharine lived her life in a perpetual state of education, studying painting in Paris and New York, and in her forties studying psychology, philosophy and anthropology at Radcliffe, Columbia, and Berkeley. She spent time living throughout Europe studying painting and displayed her art in Paris. She moved briefly to New York City in 1896 to study under William Merritt Chase.

Eventually Katharine was pulled back to her roots, developing a vision for a literary center in Hartford based on the two famous writer’s houses so close to each other – and wrote to her mother her plan for the Stowe House and her concern over the Clemens home. In 1924 she purchased and moved into her former great aunt’s home in Nook Farm which became the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in 1968. In Hartford she pitched into Farmington Avenue zoning battles, challenged the increasing commercialization of the neighborhood, and formed a group called the Friends of Hartford to help lobby the city government. A campaign was set up to raise the money to purchase the Clemens home and refurbish it. Her dedication to preservation in Hartford led to saving several important structures including the Stowe and Clemens homes. She died in June of 1864 at 94 years of age. She was inducted into the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame in 1994.