Tag Harriet Beecher Stowe

Over the Labor Day weekend, we took a drive down to Hartford, Connecticut to visit Mark Twain’s mansion. I can’t claim credit for the idea; my friend Karan made the suggestion back in the spring. It just took me until the end of the summer to get around to actually doing it.

Hartford is just a bit over 100 miles from our house, which puts it outside the 60-mile circle I had drawn up for my little half-day road trips back in the spring, but still close enough to be an easy drive when you want to get out of the house for an afternoon. Our holiday weekend weather was just gorgeous, which made our ride pleasant and insured that most of the highway traffic would be headed toward the beaches instead of inland. Except for the unavoidable occasional Masshole, it was a splendid ride.

I’m sure Sam Clemens didn’t really intend it to be this way, but his house is very easily reached from the spur of I-95 that goes through Hartford. (Long-time New Englanders will recall the “good old days” when this was the only way through Hartford, but the bypass takes most of the through traffic away from downtown now). When the Clemenses had the house constructed in the early 1870s, the area where it was built was very exclusive and still mostly sylvan, but these days is decidedly urban.

I’ll wager that at least some of you had no idea Samuel Clemens lived in Hartford. You probably thought he must have lived somewhere in Missouri, or perhaps in California. And he did live in those places as a young man, but his literary success as a writer of short stories brought him east to settle near his publisher in upstate New York, and after his father-in-law died and passed on his fortune, Clemens relocated again to be closer to New York City and a different publisher. Eventually he would create his own publishing company. His most famous novels were written in the Hartford mansion and published by his own company.

The house sits on top of a bluff that originally looked out over a small river, but in the 1960s the river was covered over with landfill and became the site of a housing project, a high school, and the parking lot that is now used for the Visitor’s Center. The Clemenses were quite wealthy at the point in their lives when they had this house built; his wife Olivia was the daughter of a wealthy banker who had left her his entire fortune when he died, and Clemens himself was flush with cash from the sales of his first major book, “The Innocents Abroad”. Consequently, the house was designed and built to be as show-offish as possible.

The Visitor’s Center is quite new and surprisingly large, almost too large. We were about a half an hour early for the next guided tour, so we whiled away the time watching the obligatory video, looking at the overpriced gift shop, and checking out the small gallery of Twain artifacts, including the compositing machine that Clemens’ publishing company used to lay out the pages of his books. Our tour guide eventually assembled a small group and headed us for the house.

This summer will go down in our memories for all the historical house tours we did: Mt. Vernon, the Adams houses in Quincy, the Longfellow House in Cambridge, and so on. Now that we are hardened veterans of the genre, I can say that the two elements that are critical to a good house tour are the quality of the tour guide and the success of preserving the house and its original furnishings. Our tour guide was one of the better ones we’ve had all summer. He was knowledgeable and thorough (without being dull), and his interaction with our tour group (which included some mentally handicapped people) was patient and thoughtful. Unfortunately, since the Clemens family moved out of the house after the death of their oldest daughter, almost none of the contents of the house are original to them. Most of the furnishings are period antiques, but not possessions of the Clemenses. (FWIW, on our travels this summer, more often than not the houses we visited did not have many original articles; only the Adams house had the furnishings and personal belongings of its famous owners.)

Even though the house did not feature original articles, they did not allow photography, so I have no interior pictures to share with you beyond the tiny ones featured on the museum website. What struck me most about the house was how dark it was. Every room featured darkly-colored wallpaper, and many of the rooms also had carved paneling that was executed in dark wood. There was little natural light except for in the indoor garden, and the lighting fixtures, which all ran on coal gas, provided only dim illumination.

Though maintained by a separate organization, the home of author Harriet Beecher Stowe is immediately next door to the Clemens house. For all intents and purposes, they are very much a duo act, except that you have to pay admission to both, and the admissions aren’t cheap. Tellingly, inside the Twain Visitor’s Center, they have a question on their evaluation form asking if you’d rather pay a single admission for both houses and have the Visitor’s Center serve both. Well, duh.

Unlike Clemens, Harriet Beecher Stowe was a life-long New Englander, except for a brief period early in her marriage spent on what was then frontier territory in Ohio. Her father and brothers were nationally-known abolitionists and preachers, and she wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” largely at the behest of one of her sisters, who encouraged her to find some way to be active in the family cause. She wrote the book while living in Brunswick, Maine, where her husband taught at Bowdoin College, but the house in Brunswick is not open to the public.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is best known for writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the pro-abolitionist novel that was a genuine world-wide sensation when it was published in 1851. Stowe cashed in on the fame from that one novel to help sell a number of books, though none were ever as popular. She was a prolific writer, cranking out a book a year for 30 years. She and her husband, a professor of languages, retired to Hartford on the money she’d earned from her books. Though their house was so close to the elaborate home of the Clemens family, it is a good deal less grand in every respect. Stowe spent her later years painting, gardening, and engaging in other creative pursuits, while her unmarried twin daughters ran the household. In contrast to the Clemens house, the Stowe house is much airier and brighter, and she preferred to have houseplants in almost every window. The contrast between the two neighbors is marked, and my impression was that most modern visitors would feel far more “at home” in the Stowe residence.

In the end, I felt the Clemens house had very little “feel” of the man himself, except for the one room at the top of the house that was his study and billiard room. It’s easy to imagine him sequestering himself up there for days on end, keeping distance from his wife and children and the irascible butler, George, who ruled the house. A house built to live up to someone else’s ideas of what a famous author should do with his money. The Stowe house, however, seemed to have the character of the “little lady” (she was only 4′ 11″), even though her daughters managed the household; her husband was infirm and bedriddden for the last few years of his life, but her fame had long ago surpassed whatever reputation he might have had, and the house is clearly “hers”.

I think both Clemens and Stowe would be a bit disappointed by the way their exclusive suburb has been swallowed up by Greater Hartford, but it’s great that both homes were saved by the historical preservation movement of the 1960s. If they could work out some power sharing deal to manage the administration of the properties and collapse the redundant visitor intakes, it would make for a better experience overall.