Mark Twain in New York

Mostly you think of Mark Twain in Missouri, traveling the Mississippi, visiting the West, or touring Europe.  However, he spent much of his adult life living in Hartford Connecticut and summering in Elmira New York.  I’m not sure what family life was like back then, but Mark Twain sounds like a mooch.  Every summer for 20 years he and his family stayed with his sister-in-law and her husband.  Not only that, but she had built a separate study for him so he could write.  For Mark Twain, the study was away from the distractions of city life.  He wrote Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and several other books and stories.  For his sister-in-law, it got him and his 30-40 cigars a day out of the house!

The study was designed to suggest a pilot house on a riverboat.  The study was moved nearby to Elmira College where his wife had attended.  A college student gave us quite a bit of history about Mark Twain while we were there.

We also saw the Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) gravesite.  There’s a section with his family along with his wife’s family.  The story is that the one column is 12 feet tall.  That’s two fathoms or the depth of the water when “Mark Twain” is called out by river boatmen.  Before I traveled, I didn’t know about the practice of putting stones or coins on graves, just flowers.  This one has all three!