In 1909 Barton deeded the house to Dr. Hubbell—perhaps in fear that the Red Cross might try to reclaim the building after her death. When she died in 1912, Dr. Hubbell together with Mrs. John Logan and Gen. W.H. Sears formed the Clara Barton Memorial Association. They hoped to turn the house into a monument to Barton’s memory. They sold memberships in the association to finance the maintenance of the property but the response was poor, and they soon ran into financial problems. The solution to their problems appeared to be at hand when Mabelle Rawson Hirons came on the scene. A native of North Oxford, Massachusetts, she was an acquaintance of Clara Barton and thus known to Hubbell and his colleagues. She claimed that Barton had appeared to her at a seance and told her to go to Washington and take charge of the Glen Echo house. This message “from the beyond” and Mrs. Hirons’ assurances that she was wealthy and would take care of all the financial problems were all that the Memorial Association members needed to receive her with open arms. Even her demand that Dr. Hubbell sign the deed over to her raised no doubts. Within a short time it became startlingly apparent that Mrs. Hirons was not about to pay off the debts of the house. Instead she was using the house to pay off _her_ debts by selling Barton’s own furniture and renting out rooms. Dr. Hubbell was evicted by Mrs. Hirons and abandoned by members of the Memorial Association who were disgusted with his failure to understand what Mrs. Hirons was doing. He had to fend for himself until a Mr. and Mrs. Canada, owners of a local grocery store, took him in. They persuaded him to sue Mrs. Hirons in 1922, and four years later the courts returned the house to him. Dr. Hubbell died in 1929 and left the house to two of his nieces, Rena and Lena Hubbell. Only Rena lived in the house, which she ran as a rooming house. In 1942 she and her sister sold it to Josephine Frank Noyes, who had come to Washington from Iowa. Mrs. Noyes and her sister Henrietta Frank continued to run it as a rooming house. They also urged people to come and see “Clara Barton’s House.” They took care of the remaining original furniture and even managed to acquire some of the pieces that Mrs. Hirons had sold. In 1958 Mrs. Noyes died and left the property to her four sisters: Frances Frank, Henrietta Frank, Katherine Frank Bronson, and Sarah Frank Rhodes. By 1963 the sisters, being quite elderly, felt that the house was too big for them to keep up and decided to sell it. The amusement park next door offered them $50,000. The sisters feared that the house would be torn down to enlarge the amusement park’s parking lot. Unhappy at such a possibility, they decided to sell the house for $35,000 to anyone who would save and maintain the property even though this would mean a financial loss to themselves.