Coachman Patrick McAleer arrived in the lives of the Clemens family on the day of Samuel and Olivia’s wedding in Elmira, New York, February 2, 1870. “He was Irish, young, slender, bright, quick as a cat, a master of his craft,” Clemens wrote, counting him, along with gardener John O’Neill and his wife Ellen, as “one of the only three persons…who could be trusted to do their work well & faithfully without supervision…He kept his horses and carriages and cows in good condition; he kept the bins & the hayloft full; if a horse and cow was unsatisfactory he made a change; he filled the cellars with coal and wood in the summers when we were away; as soon as a snowstorm was ended he was out with his snow-plow; if a thing needed mending he attended to it at once.”

McAleer rode horseback with the Clemens daughters, Clara and Susy, and drove them in the carriage with their mother on afternoon jaunts. He let Clara drive occasionally, her father reports, “holding the reins in the safe places and prattling a stream.”

The girls “conferred their society upon him freely in the stable, and he protected them while they took risks petting the horses in the stalls and riding the reluctant calves.” He let them help stable his horses and drive the ducks down to the stream below the house. In 1872, Patrick married Mary Reagan (1854-1913) from Elmira, New York. Together Mary and Patrick raised at least seven children – Michael, James, Edward, William, Mary, Alice, and Anna– in the small, two story living quarters attached to the carriage house, which also served as a barn with a hayloft. A son, William McAleer, remembered the good times he and his brothers and sisters had leaping from a second-floor hayloft balcony. When in 1906 news came to Clemens in New York that McAleer had died, he rushed to Hartford and served as pallbearer.