The Darwin R. Barker Museum is welcoming visitors to its newest exhibit, “Mark Twain in Fredonia: An Exhibition to be Inspected by Anybody Who Feels an Interest in Miraculous Inanimate Objects,” which highlights the impact the famous author had on the village in only six visits.

Twain first came to Fredonia in 1870, lecturing at the Fredonia Normal School chapel – today’s One Temple Square – as a guest of the Fredonia Library Association, which had welcomed suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton a week earlier.

Fredonia won over the famous author with its “intelligent, attractive” audience, and its proximity to his new home in Buffalo made the village an ideal place for his widowed mother and sister to live. Sure enough, the Clemens women quickly became cornerstones in the community through their leading roles in local organizations including the local suffrage movement, the WCA Home, the Shakespeare Club, the Library Association, and in the first female-led mass movement in US history, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

The Barker Library was born out of the efforts of these temperance “crusaders,” and some of our earliest books were donated by Mark Twain at the request of his mother, Jane Clemens.

The exhibit includes a selection of the books originally donated by Mark Twain that have recently been conserved thanks to a grant from the Northern Chautauqua Community Foundation. The books have been cleaned, mended and reinforced to stabilize their condition for display. One of these books is The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, whose title became shorthand for the period between 1865 and 1910, when greed, corruption, and hypocrisy among the political and business classes was so rampant that it defined the era, according to Twain and other observers.

Before long, however, Mark Twain’s enchantment with Fredonia turned to disillusionment and open scorn. Several failed investments and aggravating interpersonal experiences convinced the satirist and social critic that Fredonia was the epitome of all that he despised about Gilded Age America. In his autobiography written near the end of his life, Twain mentioned Fredonia only indirectly-and shrewdly referenced a local rivalry — as “that stud farm at Dunkirk.” In 1898, Twain wrote The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, a short story believed to be a critique of Fredonia.

The exhibit features a diverse range of artifacts linked to the Clemens family, including a signed Mark Twain letter acknowledging his lifetime membership at the Barker, watches made by a Fredonian company that inspired the Sears & Roebuck model, a ceremonial uniform complete with a Spanish sword awarded by the Pope, and a cabinet constructed from the remains of Commodore Perry’s Lake Erie flagship.

The exhibit is open 4 to 8 p.m. Tuesdays and 1 to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays through July.