Samuel Clemens, known as Mark Twain, first encountered Elmira through a picture of Olivia Langdon that her younger brother Charles showed him while the two were traveling on the Quaker City steamer during a voyage to Europe and the Holy Land that Clemens was reporting. A later courtship led to Clemens's marriage to Olivia on February 2, 1870. Beginning in 1870 and continuing until 1889, Samuel and Olivia Clemens and their family spent summers in Elmira at Quarry Farm, the East Hill home of Olivia's adopted older sister Susan Crane and her husband Theodore, where the quieter setting helped Clemens write more productively than in Hartford. In 1874, Susan Crane had a small octagonal study designed by Alfred Thorp, associate of Edward Tuckerman Potter, built for Clemens above the main house, with decorative features resembling those of the Clemenses' Hartford home. There Clemens wrote major portions of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the Mississippi, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and in 1886 he said the study could be called the home of Huckleberry Finn and other books of his because they were written there. In 1952, the study was moved from Quarry Farm to the Elmira College campus. Elmira College itself opened as Elmira Female College in October 1855 after Cowles Hall's cornerstone was laid in 1854; its central octagonal design reflected a popular mid-nineteenth-century style, Olivia Langdon's father Jervis Langdon served on the board of trustees, and Olivia studied there in the Preparatory Department beginning in 1858, qualifying her as a member of the Class of 1864.