Exploring The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut

Table Of Content

• Farmington AvenueHartford, CT 06105
• Mark Twain House & Museum
• The former home of Samuel Clemens and family remembers the happiest period of the author's life.
• Livy’s Windows: How the Hartford House Began
• Patterned Brick - Mark Twain House
• Graveyard Shift Ghost Tours
• Virtual Tour:The Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut

Katharine Seymour Day, Stowe’s grandniece, Isabella Hooker’s granddaughter, and a dedicated preservationist, played a role in saving both homes and founded the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center. Today, the Katharine Seymour Day House is the site of the Stowe Center’s library and administrative offices. Twain’s first visit to Hartford led not only to the publication of The Innocents Abroad (1869) but to the beginning of his love affair with the city, a banking and insurance center that was one of the wealthiest towns in the United States.

Farmington AvenueHartford, CT 06105

“I think this is the best built and the handsomest town I have ever seen,” pronounced Samuel Clemens, who moved to Hartford and Nook Farm in 1871. The author, best known as Mark Twain, built his extraordinary, fanciful, 19-room house, designed by noted New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter, in 1874 on a plot near Stowe’s residence. The Mark Twain Home in Hartford, Connecticut is often described as an example of Gothic Revival or Picturesque Gothic architecture.

Mark Twain House & Museum

Located behind and to the side of the carriage house, the museum freed the house and carriage house of office spaces and exhibition galleries. Robert A. M. Stern Architects designed the 32,700-square-foot building, which is the first in Connecticut and the first museum in the United States to achieve LEED Certification from the U.S. Edward Tuckerman Potter's patterns of brick in 1874 are not unique to the Mark Twain House.

The former home of Samuel Clemens and family remembers the happiest period of the author's life.

While we are excited to welcome more visitors into what Mark Twain called “the loveliest home that ever was,” our priority is the health and safety of our visitors, our local community, and our entire Museum staff. Construction began in August of that year‚ while Sam and Livy were abroad. Although there was still much finish work to be completed‚ the family moved into their house on September 19‚ 1874.

Livy’s Windows: How the Hartford House Began

And the billiard table provided a break from work, or even a workplace, where pages of handwritten Twain prose could be arranged and rearranged as he honed. And adjacent to this is the billiard room, the place where Mark Twain’s creativity flowed. A painting of an Arab scene and a shadowbox of the Alhambra on the wall reflect a fascination with Orientalism that is not only Victorian but also wholly Twainian. A bronze bust of Mark himself, executed by family friend and protégé Karl Gerhardt, peers without a hint of a smile from a corner of the room.

Patterned Brick - Mark Twain House

Isabella annually submitted a bill granting women the right to vote, but it did not pass in her lifetime. In this prequel to The New Jim Crow, Dr. Betting L. Love serves up a blistering account of four decades of educational reform through the lens of the people who lived it. Punished for Dreaming lays bare the devastating effect on 25 Black Americans caught in the intersection of economic gain and racist ideology. Then, with input from leading U.S. economists, Dr. Love offers a road map for repair, arguing for reparations with transformation for all children at its core. The Great Abolitionist is the first major biography of Charles Sumner to be published in over fifty years. Twain created his most beloved books in this house and our group headed up the wide stairs to see precisely where he laid the words to paper.

Stick Style Porch - Mark Twain House

To the right is a large gift shop that sells at least one thing you should buy – Twain’s books. There are also various cups, candy, clothing, magnets and other souvenirs with fun and pithy quotes from Twain. In Missouri, Twain was born into poverty but learned to read and write during an early newspaper apprenticeship. This gave him the foundation for his later renown as a great American novelist, documenting his life and adventures as he advanced his career as a typesetter, river pilot, western gold prospector, newspaper reporter, lecturer, and author. Mark Twain is often cited as the first “great American novelist,” and Hartford used to be the site of a thriving publishing industry that hosted many writers, including Twain’s neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Graveyard Shift Ghost Tours

Named one of the 10 Best Historic Homes in the World by National Geographic, the Mark Twain House in Hartford is today a thriving museum that attracts visitors and Twain fans (not to mention architecture buffs) from all over the world. Whether you’re a Twainiac, lifelong bibliophile, or jewelry connoisseur; Browse & shop exclusive finds and a lovely variety of gifts for everyone of all ages at The Mark Twain House & Museum Store. Games, interesting reads, notebooks, unique apparel...We have it all!

Jimmy Buffett's tour of Mark Twain House - Eyewitness News 3

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The door through which he entered was shielded by a screen, in Victorian style – the divider between the family’s world and that of the people who kept things running under Livy’s supervision. Built in 1874 by architect Edward Tuckerman Potter, the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut is an interesting feast for the eyes. Potter's colors, brick ornamentation, and brackets, trusses and balcony-filled gables are the architectural equivalent of Mark Twain's well-built, exciting American novels. Note here, the patterned rounded brick part of the house surrounded by the horizontal, vertical, and triangular geometric patterns of the wooden porch—an appealing visual contrast of textures and shapes.

If you’re a writer – perhaps our next great American novelist – you might want to write inside Twain’s house. About once every month or so, writers can rent a seat in the library for a few hours to write in the same place where Twain wrote his most famous books. For just $50, you can join other scribblers in the quiet library with only the bubbling sound of the conservatory fountain.

No doubt, Samuel Clemens had seen or heard of the Nott Memorial at Union College, a similarly rounded structure designed by his architect, Edward Tuckerman Potter. At the Mark Twain house, the conservatory is off the library, just as the Nott Memorial used to house the college library. The rambling wooden porch at the Mark Twain House is reminiscent of both Gustav Stickley's Craftsman Farms-type of Arts and Crafts architecture combined with Frank Lloyd Wright's  geometric designs found on his Prairie Style homes. However, Wright, born in 1867, would have been a child when Samuel Clemens built his house in 1874.

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It’s the place where he spent his family years and wrote his most popular books. Meanwhile, writers and well-known people in other fields enjoyed the hospitality of the Nook Farm experience. Sarah Orne Jewett, Bret Harte, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Matthew Arnold, William Dean Howells, writer and editor for The Atlantic Monthly, and other literary talents from across the country considered Hartford a necessary stopover.

In the post-Civil War years, Hartford was home to nearly two dozen book publishers, and Twain first came to the city to meet with Elisha Bliss, Jr., president of American Publishing Company. Bliss had read Twain’s magazine tales of his travels in Europe and the Holy Land aboard the steamer Quaker City. A passionate feminist, Isabella Beecher Hooker worked much of her life to secure women the right to vote, a view that many of her day considered outrageous. Women’s suffrage was thought of as so radical that even Isabella’s sisters, Harriet and Catharine, were opposed.

The leaf motif, bringing "nature" into the architectural detailing, is typical of the Arts and Crafts movement, led by English-born William Morris. Given Susy’s sudden death from meningitis in 1896 at the age of 24, and Jean’s death from drowning in 1909 at the age of 29, the Clemens’ time in Hartford came to represent some of their happiest years. There is ample FREE parking for cars and buses in our Farmington Avenue lot and an additional smaller lot off Forest Street. Set your GPS for 385 Farmington Avenue, Hartford to find our main parking lot entrance or to 65 Forest Street for the smaller lot.