At 332 Center Street, the Kenney family lived from 1898 until 1911 after Patrick Kenney, who worked for the Singer Sewing Machine Company in Minneapolis, came to the company's Mankato store in 1897 and bought the house in 1898 with his wife and nine children. One daughter, Frances "Bick" Kenney, became friends with Maud Hart, who lived across the street, and the girls played, imagined, and grew up together in Mankato. Beginning in 1940, readers around the world came to know them as Tacy Kelly and Betsy Ray in Maud Hart Lovelace's Betsy-Tacy books. In 1920, Bick married Charles Eugene Kirch in Minneapolis, and the couple later moved to New York, but she and Maud remained close friends despite the years and distance, even traveling to Europe together in 1968, until Bick died in New York on December 14, 1969. After the Kenneys left Mankato in 1911, later owners included junior high school English teacher Ila Flathers, who owned the house from 1920 until 1965 and welcomed Bick and Maud back for visits. In 1995, the Betsy-Tacy Society acquired and restored the house for use as an interpretive center, gift shop, and office, and the building was listed as a National Literary Landmark in 2010 and locally designated as a Heritage Preservation Landmark in 2011.