Mark Twain

Mark Twain House & Museum
Hartford, Connecticut

By Jacques Lamarre

In 2008, with no ceremony, I was handed a simple brass key to Mark Twain’s Hartford home. Having just been hired as the director of Marketing and Special Programs, I was given a few rules: do not touch anything, do not sit on the furniture, and, for God’s sake, don’t enter the house after the alarm has been set. The key went onto my keychain alongside those for my house, my Jeep Liberty, and my shed, and I began my efforts to lure visitors into the Clemens family’s house and its adjacent museum.

Up until that time, I only had been to the Twain House on an otherwise unmemorable date. I don’t know who chose the house tour for a date activity, but it likely had to do with my being a resident of the West End of Hartford, and, at the time, without a car. I cannot remember my date’s name, but the house made an immediate impression. That was the Clemenses’ intention.

One can track the trajectory of Twain’s life, work and gathering sophistication by visiting his homes. I have visited Samuel Clemens’ childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri as well as his birthplace, a humble two-room shack in Florida, Missouri. Both homes lay bare his Lower Midwest roots and illustrate the elements that would feature heavily in several of his most popular works. He left Missouri a Clemens and found his pen name of Mark Twain when he went out west.

His time in the rough-and-tumble, Wild West atmosphere of Nevada would find him living in a variety of frontier structures. In California, his accommodations ranged from mining camps to boarding houses. Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, engaged his services as a traveling correspondent to cover the first transatlantic pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. This trip on the steamship the Quaker City would not only expose him to a rich world of antiquities and awe-inspiring sights — all chronicled with a wry cynicism in his first major work, The Innocents Abroad (1869) — it would also introduce him to his future brother-in-law, Charley Langdon.

Twain experienced love at first sight after seeing an ivory miniature picture of Charley’s sister Olivia “Livy” Langdon. After meeting in New York City in 1869, an ardent courtship ensued, much of it conducted in the Langdon family home in Elmira, New York. The Langdons’ wealth and social prominence, along with Twain’s burgeoning success as an author and lecturer, allowed him to graduate into a new circle of society and a heightened level of ambition. After their marriage, Livy and Sam two moved into a gorgeous, fully-furnished home on a highly-desirable street in Buffalo — a gift from Sam’s father-in-law. Their time in Buffalo was brief, only one year. Twain set his sights on a move to Hartford. It wasn’t his first visit to a city that would loom large in his life.

In 1868, Twain visited Hartford — at the time the wealthiest city per capita in the United States — to meet with the publisher of the forthcoming The Innocents Abroad. Always one to economize efforts, Twain used the visit to file one of his ongoing travelogues to the Alta California. “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief…. 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.”

Sam, Livy, and their first child Langdon moved to Hartford in 1871 to be close to the American Publishing Company. They rented a home in Hartford’s West End, then known as Nook Farm. Named after a bend in the Hog River, Nook Farm was and would be home to many of Hartford’s cultural and political elite, including author Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, journalist, Charles Dudley Warner, actor and playwright William Gillette, Senator Joseph Hawley, and, eventually, Katharine Hepburn.

It was during this time that four significant events occurred. The first, the tragic death of their young son in 1872, a devastating blow for the family. This was followed by the joyful births of their daughters Susy in 1872 and Clara in 1874. The fourth, Sam and Livy purchased a plot of land on Farmington Avenue to begin construction of the first home that they could properly call their own.

Positioned overlooking the Park River (the new and much nicer name for the Hog River), the property sat on the edge of Hartford adjacent to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s final home. Sam and Livy engaged architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design a house that would be both a family home and a jaw-dropping showstopper that reflected the Clemenses’ growing social importance. The construction of the massive Victorian Gothic home with its ornate brick and woodwork would cause tongues to wag around the conservative town. The Hartford Times wrote, “The novelty displayed in the architecture of the building, the oddity of its internal arrangement and the fame of its owner will all conspire to make it a house of note for a long time to come.” They weren’t wrong.

The seventeen years that the Clemenses lived in their beloved home were to be their happiest and were Sam’s most prolific and productive. Ironically, it was during his time that he wrote three of the works that would lean most heavily on his Midwest roots: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Of his Hartford home, Twain wrote in 1897, “To us our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome—& we could not enter it unmoved.”

Over my years at the Twain House, that simple brass key would grow in weight and import in my pocket. Every day when I left, I would swing by the bust of Twain in the lobby and say (quietly, so no one would question my sanity), “I hope I did right by you today.” In 2016, I left the Mark Twain House for another job. I still live in the Hartford area and can visit, but I feel acutely the loss of that key and my access to the bewilderingly beautiful and eccentric home that I too could not enter unmoved.