Photos Courtesy of Darwin R. Barker Historical Museum (McLaren Collection) Top: Four generations of Mark Twain’s family were photographed circa 1880 in Fredonia where they lived for several decades. Above, at far left is Twain’s mother, Jane Clemens. At the far right is his sister, Pamelia Moffett, a founder of the WCA Home in Fredonia. In the center are Pamelia’s daughter, Annie Webster, and Annie’s daughter, Alice Jane.

Special to the OBSERVER

One of the women who first joined the Woman’s Christian Association in Fredonia was Mark Twain’s sister, Pamelia Ann Clemens Moffett, who worked to open the WCA Home for Aged women in 1892.

Today, the home still operates as an assisted living facility with private rooms for 37, and is celebrating its 125th Anniversary. The current board of directors is paying tribute to the founders of the WCA Home and in honor of the Anniversary has requested donations of $125 from interested citizens. The home has operated as a non-profit since a group of Fredonia’s prominent women established it in the 19th century. The original founders raised enough money to purchase an elegant home for aging women in the village and begin an endowment fund that has sustained it through the decades. Donations are gratefully accepted and can be made online at www.wcahome.org/giving.

When Pamelia Moffett moved to Fredonia in 1870, she did so at the recommendation of her brother, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who liked the audience he encountered while lecturing here. Twain had just married Olivia Langdon of Elmira and the couple had settled in Buffalo. A widow for five years, Pamelia was 43 years old and the mother of Annie, age 17, and Samuel, age 10, when she came here by train with her children and mother, Jane Hampton Clemens. The extended family lived together at several Fredonia residences spanning three decades, first at 29 Day Street, then 65-67 Temple Street, then 36 Central Avenue, and finally 20 Central Ave., the site of the Larson-Timko funeral Home.

According to the authoritative Mark Twain researchers, Pamelia is considered to be the model for Tom Sawyer’s cousin Mary in the “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.”

In January 1892, she lived in the Fredonia home of her widowed daughter, Annie Webster, and joined many of her friends who were chartering the Woman’s Christian Association to operate Fredonia’s first assisted living home for aged women. At age 65, Pamelia was the fourth oldest among a total of about 30 women who were either officers of the new association or volunteered to work during the 23 months leading up to the opening of the home.

According to WCA archives, Pamelia agreed to write articles announcing the new home and place them in local newspapers “in order that the public might become intelligent regarding our plans and objectives.” She also took on the job of working with three others to draft a scale of prices for entrance into the home. That fall, the first articles announcing the home and its entrance fees appeared in Buffalo and Chautauqua County newspapers.

Pamelia was eight years older than Twain and took motherly charge of him as a boy. She was kind-hearted, talented in music and intellectually energetic, but of delicate health. Pamelia and Twain maintained a warm and affectionate correspondence throughout their lives.

Pamelia’s daughter Annie married Fredonian Charles Webster and they are both buried in Forest Hill Cemetery in the village. Pamelia’s son, Samuel, graduated from Fredonia Normal School and Columbia University and had a notable career as a newspaperman and editor of Collier’s Magazine.

The Fredonia Censor published a news item about the death of Pamelia on Sept. 7, 1904, after she died at the CrestView Sanatarium in Greenwich, Connecticut. She had spent most of her life from 1870 to 1903 in Fredonia, the newspaper noted, adding that she had “a large circle of friends who mourn her death. She was a very intelligent woman, always amiable and pleasing, and we doubt if she ever made a remark that wounded or pained a human being.”