The son of a New York businessman, Franklin G. Whitmore settled in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1880, where he established a real estate office. Whitmore began serving as Clemens’s business agent at least as early as 1886; in that year he supervised construction of the Paige typesetting machine. Their sustained, if uneven, business relationship drew to a close after Whitmore finally sold the Clemenses’ Hartford house in 1903.