Hartford’s Farmington Avenue is one of the more notable streets in the capital city. Amidst the Cathedral of St. Joseph, Aetna, state offices and shopping centers are Victorian-era homes, one belonging to arguably the quintessential American author: Samuel “Mark Twain” Clemens.
Now a museum, The Mark Twain House & Museum has been recognized as “America’s Best House Museum” by Forbes, which noted in a glowing review that the landmark “has it all” regarding “architecture, gorgeous interior design, lovely grounds and stories about its original owners and occupants that are fascinating, heart-warming and inspiring.”
The house “measures 11,500 square feet, and has 25 rooms distributed through three floors,” the museum’s website states, adding that “It displayed the latest in modern innovations when it was built in 1874.” The house’s construction cost Samuel and Olivia “Livy” Clemens between $40,000 to $45,000, with delays causing the former frustration. Nevertheless, once the family moved into the home in September 1874, the author enjoyed the “happiest and most productive years of his life,” the museum’s website claims.
It truly was productive. From 1874 to 1891, when he called Connecticut home, Twain wrote some of his best-known works, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court (1889). In a letter dated Jan. 19, 1897, the renowned author — suffering from financial strains (which plagued him throughout most of his adult life) and the death of his daughter Susy less than six months before — fondly reflected on the house, writing:
“To us, our house was not unsentient [sic] matter — it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome — and we could not enter it unmoved.”
This is the story of when Twain called Hartford home.
From the Banks of the Mississippi to Nook Farm
Samuel Clemens was born Nov. 30, 1835, in Florida, Mo., to John Marshall and Jane Moffit Clemens. Known later for his energetic spirit, he was “relatively in poor health for the first 10 years of his life,” according to History.com.
Despite his health, his youth on the Mississippi River’s banks, especially in Hannibal, filled him with “such fondness,” and he dreamed of becoming a riverboat pilot (which he accomplished by 1857 at the age of 22, spending four years in that occupation). But at 11, Clemens was thrust into the workforce after his father’s death to help the family financially, employed as a printer’s apprentice for a local newspaper “arrang[ing] the type for each of the newspaper’s stories, allowing Sam to read the news of the world while completing his work,” as noted by The Mark Twain House & Museum’s biography.
Prior to earning national attention as a writer, he held various newspaper jobs in New York and Philadelphia; volunteered for the Confederacy in the American Civil War (although he quit after only two weeks); and failed as a prospector in the Nevada Territory and the West. After the last enterprise, he wrote once again for a Nevada newspaper under the pseudonym “Mark Twain” — a term used in river navigation; “mark twain” means water that is two fathoms (or about 12 feet) deep, according to PBS American Experience.
Clemens’ youthful adventures were, perhaps, providential, serving as perfect fodder for his later writings, and featuring prominently in Roughing It (1872). What brought him early acclaim, however, were the short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), followed by his first best-selling book, Innocents Abroad (1869), where he recounted his trip to Europe and the Middle East, which was praised for its “vivid descriptions and tongue-in-cheek observations,” according to The Mark Twain House & Museum.
Not only did the trip abroad spur his creative output, but also his love life. Described as “fortuitous” by History.com, Clemens “met on the boat a young man named Charlie Langdon, who invited Clemens to dine with his family in New York and introduced him to his sister Olivia; the writer fell in love with her.” In another account, as told by The Mark Twain House & Museum, Langdon showed Clemens a picture of her — and he fell in love at first sight.
The feeling was reciprocated as Olivia — or Livy — and Clemens would eventually marry in February 1870. During their courtship, Clemens already envisioned where the pair would settle. Initially, he considered Cleveland, but that changed after his first trip to Hartford in September 1868.
At the time, Connecticut’s capital had the highest per capita income in the nation, driven by a “booming, prosperous, prestigious” business climate, becoming “postwar America’s most resurgent city,” according to Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers. As Clemens wrote to Livy, Hartford was “the pleasantest city, to the eye, that America can show,” adding, “I never saw any place before where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here.” The author was enraptured by the city’s industrial powerhouses (including the Colt Arms factory, Pratt & Whitney and the like); its centrality between New York and Boston; and its proximity to the headquarters of American Publishing Company, which published his books, according to The Life of Mark Twain: The Middle Years, 1871-1891 by Gary Scharnhorst.
But most of all, the idyllic area known as Nook Farm captured his imagination. As he once wrote in the Alta Journal in 1868:
“Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief. …Each house sits in the midst of about an acre of green grass, or flower beds or ornamental shrubbery, guarded on all sides by the trimmest hedges of arbor-vitae, and by files of huge forest trees that cast a shadow like a thunder-cloud. Some of these stately dwellings are almost buried from sight in parks and forests of these noble trees. Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”
It was there the Clemenses would build the home still standing today.
The House’s Exotic Contours
Once a 600-plus acre “graceful wooded swell” in the early 1800s, according to Powers’ biography, Nook Farm was “on the southern slope of Asylum Hill” and “tucked up against a curved bank on the North Park River.” However, by the mid-century, the area was reduced to a 140-acre farm after the “Hartford and New Haven Railroad, built in the late 1830s, cut through the southern third of the parcel,” as noted by Connecticut History.
Nevertheless, the area “coalesced into a miniature nonesuch realm: an intertwined and interrelated Camelot of wealthy artists, social reformers, thinkers, and writers, who shared a warren of ivy-draped houses in the Victorian, Gothic, and federal styles,” as described by Powers. It was here that Hartford’s prominent residents lived, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was one of the best-selling books in the world at the time.
After briefly living in Buffalo, N.Y., Twain and his family moved to Hartford, renting a house in Nook Farm in 1871. The following year, he bought three acres and enlisted architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to construct a new home.
The construction took longer than anticipated — and “more than $10,000 ahead of Livy’s projections in 1871,” according to Powers. For a while, the “end was nowhere in sight” as Powers recounts in Twain’s biography. However, during the construction, the “house’s exotic contours” prompted much gossip and regular news coverage, as written by the Hartford Daily Times on March 23, 1874: “Many of the readers of The Times, doubtless, have had at least an external view of the structure, which already has acquired something beyond a local fame; and such persons, we think, will agree with us in the opinion that it is one of the oddest looking buildings in the State ever designed for a dwelling, if not in the whole country.”
Furthermore, the house’s two-story tower “put some people in mind of a pilothouse above a deck and a false myth took hold over the years that Mark Twain had intended the house to resemble a steamboat,” according to Powers.
Tired of waiting, Twain and the family moved into the house on Sept. 21, 1874, despite the construction being incomplete. According to Powers, plumbers and carpenters still milled about the premises and “rat-a-tatting away in the house,” much to the annoyance of the famed author, who wrote:
“We have taken up quarters on the second story, sleeping in a guest room, eating in a nursery and using my study for a parlor — making the suite habitable and comfortable by using odds and ends of furniture that belong everywhere else in the house. And we are comfortable — when the banging of the hammers stops for a while.”
As for the house’s design, Powers credits Livy since it reflected her “understanding of Victorian material display as evidence of moral and intellectual worth.” However, Twain had several inputs of his own, including the “Venetian bed, a Scottish-castle mantel for the library, an assortment of gadgets (in addition to the speaking tubes, they included a telephone, a ‘type-machine,’ and a home-rigged rubber tube that transferred gas from chandelier to a bedside lamp for nighttime reading).”
Yet a home is not only material items, amenities or mementos, but the people inside. Quoting American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, an engraved brass plate over the fireplace succinctly reflected the spirit of the house: “The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.” Many people frequented the halls, as the Clemenses were no strangers to hosting dinners, soirees and overnight visitors, as Powers notes; but, once the workmen departed, it became an oasis for the family, who now included Twain, Livy and their three daughters — Susy (1872), Clara (1874) and Jean (1880). As for writing, Twain penned many of his masterworks while in Hartford, as well as at his sister-in-law’s farm in Elmira, N.Y.
While book sales were successful, Twain “continually made bad investments in new inventions, which eventually brought him to bankruptcy,” according to The Mark Twain House & Museum. In 1891, to “economize and pay back his debts,” Twain moved the family from Hartford to Europe. As Powers describes, “The American dollar’s tremendous purchasing power in Europe was no longer an amusing curiosity, but a survival resource: they could no longer afford the upkeep of the Hartford house and the social productions for which the house was designed.”
Twain would not return until March 1895.
‘City of Heartbreak’
The humorist and author’s twilight years were filled with money problems and, unfortunately, much pain. By December 1894, Twain felt he “could never again afford to live in the Hartford house, ‘though it would break the family’s hearts if they could believe it,’” according to Powers. Still, the family held on to the property.
When Twain and the family briefly returned to Hartford from Europe, he was at first hesitant to “go near the salmon-colored house with its Gothic spires,” according to Powers, but, as he wrote to Livy:
“…as soon as I entered this front door I was siezed [sic] with a furious desire to have us all in this house again & right away, & never go outside the grounds any more forever — certainly never again to Europe.’ … ‘How ugly, tasteless, repulsive, are all the domestic interiors I have ever seen in Europe compared with the perfect taste of this ground floor, with its delicious dream of harmonious color, & its all-pervading spirit of peace & serenity & deep contentment… It is the loveliest home that ever was.”
Nevertheless, the home was soon to be synonymous with heartbreak when Susy passed away in the house from spinal meningitis at 24 years old in 1896. Twain was no stranger to death of children — his son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months on June 2, 1872; however, his daughter’s premature death nearly shattered his spirits. As he wrote to his friend John Twichell after her passing, “It is not the city of Hartford, it is the city of Heartbreak.”
The death had an equally deep impact on Livy, who suffered from physical ailments of her own. The pair was unable to “bear being in the place of her death,” and the family never lived in the house again, according to The Mark Twain House & Museum. For Twain, however, he resisted letting the place go as long as he could. Upon reflection in his autobiography, he shared why:
“The spirits of the dead hallow a house, for me. It was not so with other members of my family. Susy died in the house we built in Hartford. Mrs. Clemens would never enter it again. But it made the house dearer to me. I have entered it once since, when it was tenantless and silent and forlorn, but to me it was a holy place and beautiful. It seemed to me that the spirits of the dead were all about me, and would speak to me and welcome me if they could: Livy, and Susy, and George, and Henry Robinson, and Charles Dudley Warner. How good and kind they were, and how lovable their lives!”
Yet, by the 1890s, Nook Farm was no longer in a “golden age,” as Connecticut History describes, with residents passing away and industrialization creeping into the area. Though Twain’s lecture tour sales eventually relieved his financial strains and he continued publishing books, he sold the Hartford house in May 1903 for $28,800 to Richard Bissell, the president of the Hartford Fire Insurance Company — even though the family had “sunk as much as $110,000 to $167,000 into the house since 1873,” according to The Loveliest Home That Ever War: The Story of the Mark Twain House in Hartford by Steve Courtney.
The same year, Livy’s health deteriorated drastically, so much so the pair moved to better climates in Italy, which “seemed to improve her condition, but that was only temporary,” according to History.com. She died on June 5, 1904. Tragically, Twain would witness another loss when Jean suffered a fatal epileptic seizure on Christmas Eve 1909. Meanwhile, Twain died only a few short months later on April 21, 1910, in Redding.
After the Bissells occupied the premises until 1917, the place changed hands several times, becoming an apartment building and housing The Mark Twain Branch of the Hartford Public Library, until restoration efforts started in 1963, “the same year the Mark Twain House was designated a National Historic Landmark,” according to the museum.
Today, Twain is renowned for his (and, perhaps, some falsely attributed) humorous aphorisms; moral writings and lectures, particularly on race; seminal contributions to American literature; and scrutiny for language usage in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Yet authors, journalists and humorists have since looked to him for inspiration. As Ernest Hemingway, a titan of American literature in his own right, once stated, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” Even his wild hair, mustache and white suit is one of the most recognizable portraits of any author.
In short, Twain was prolific. His personality embodied the American spirit to an international audience during his time; and his work continues to resonate with present-day readers.
To think the Missouri native found Hartford as an inspiring setting to write his epics is a testament to what the city once was — and where it can be. His beautifully preserved home, much like his writings, is a hallowed landmark, embodying his lively soul, and a reminder that Hartford has the capability of being a hub of industry and artistry again.
Till next time
Your Yankee Doodle Dandy,
Andy Fowler
What neat history do you have in your town? Send it to yours truly and I may end up highlighting it in a future edition of ‘Hidden in the Oak.’ Please encourage others to follow and subscribe to our newsletters and podcast, ‘Y CT Matters.’
