The Best Built and Handsomest Town
Written by Steve Courtney
Making a Home in Hartford
The writer Samuel L. Clemens’s first visit to Hartford in early 1868 was a business trip. After a life that had included a printing apprenticeship, a job as a steamboat pilot, a two-week stint of quasi-military service, minimal silver mining, and intensive newspaper reporting, he was on the high road to fame. “Am pretty well known, now–mean to be better known,” he wrote to his mother. A brilliantly rambling story about a frog-jumping contest, published in New York, had given him coast-to-coast recognition as more than just a California funny man. He had picked up a nom de plume, Mark Twain, along the way. He had signed on to a cruise to the Holy Land, and written travel letters of wit and wild burlesque for his newspaper, San Francisco’s Alta California, which were reprinted in journals throughout the country.
Back from the cruise, he had been summoned to Hartford by the president of the American Publishing Company there, Elisha Bliss. Bliss wanted him to turn those letters into a book. He was still writing letters to his newspaper: He informed his Alta readers: “I think this is the best built and the handsomest town I have ever seen.” He was amused by the “Land of Steady Habits,” which had a definite puritanical tinge: “I had to walk three blocks to find a cigar store. I saw no drinking saloons at all in the street – but I was not looking for any.”
The city of 30,000 or so may not have been the richest in the nation, as a local booster claimed, but the boast was a plausible one. “This is the centre of Connecticut wealth. Hartford dollars have a place in half the great moneyed enterprises in the Union,” Clemens wrote. Samuel Colt had built the largest private factory in the world there, and during the late Civil War his gun business had thrived. Other factories manufactured rifles, machine tools, sewing machines, woolen goods, and leather belting for machines. Banks and mercantile businesses lined the downtown streets, and a river trade made the Hartford docks a busy scene. But it was the insurance companies that were the pride of the city: “All those Phoenix and Charter Oak Insurance Companies, whose gorgeous chromo-lithographic show-cards it has been my delight to study in far away cities, are located here.”
Clemens married coal and lumber heiress Olivia Langdon of Elmira, N.Y., in 1870, and in 1871 moved to Hartford. In 1873-74 her money and his proceeds from an account of his Western life, Roughing It, enabled them to build the ornate, multicolored-brick house of turrets and balconies that still stands on Farmington Avenue. There they raised three daughters. And during that time, Clemens wrote most of the works for which he is most remembered.
Productive Hartford Years
A walk in the woods with a friend in the hills near the city got him telling tales of his life as a pilot on the Mississippi, which not only resulted ultimately in his book Life on the Mississippi but also seems to have revived his work on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and then (over the following years, with long gaps) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. His The Prince and the Pauper was to some extent written for his immediate family; they dramatized the novel in the Hartford house’s library. And A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court opens in Hartford with a brawl at the Pratt & Whitney plant (see excerpt) and works its way through humorous interludes – a knights’ baseball game, for example — to an explosive and grisly climax; this last part was written in a Hartford neighbor’s study where workmen were banging away at a remodeling job on the ceiling below.
Clemens admired his wealthy city and his connections with its elite. His neighbors included the co-owners of The Hartford Daily Courant, one of them a former governor and future Connecticut senator, the other Clemens’s collaborator on a political novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (see Charles Dudley Warner in this anthology). Others included lawyers, insurance executives, factory owners, and another literary star: Harriet Beecher Stowe, right across the lawn. He wrote the bulk of many of his works during summer retreats in Elmira on Olivia Clemens’s sister’s farm and reserved much of his Hartford life for revision work, shorter magazine pieces, and after-dinner speeches. His family life was intense; life seems from his multitude of letters and journals to have been an endless round of social engagements and participation in charitable and city events such as a church spelling bee and a welcome to visiting General Ulysses S. Grant at a podium raised in Bushnell Park. Above all, his life in Hartford reflected his deep affection for, and involvement in, the lives of his wife and his three daughters, two of whom attended Hartford Public High School for a while. When the family traveled to Europe in 1873 and 1878-79, the goal in part was to gather furnishings for the Hartford house.
From Hartford to Heartbreak
His fascination with “the center of Connecticut wealth” led to a wonderful 1874 speech in which he spoke of the “quadruple band of brothers working sweetly hand in hand” that gave the city its strength and magnificence: “the Colt’s arms company making the destruction of our race easy and convenient, our life-insurance citizens paying for the victims when they pass away, Mr. Batterson [a noted monument-maker] perpetuating their memory with his stately monuments, and our fire-insurance comrades taking care of the hereafter.” In all seriousness, though, he tried many different business ventures during his Hartford life, including a brief stint on the board of a new insurance company (not a success). He invented and patented a three-hook clasp for fastening shirts (not a success, though its descendant is used on brassieres); a game for remembering various historical dates (not a success); and a surprisingly successful “Mark Twain Self-Pasting Scrapbook” that didn’t require a separate glue pot.
“My axiom is, to succeed in business: avoid my example,” Clemens recalled ruefully in late life. His regret was justified. His fascination with business had led him to financial failure in Hartford. A good part of this was his immersion in a seemingly never-ending investment in a mechanical typesetting machine. Having been a printer’s apprentice in his youth, setting type by hand, he knew it would be a sure winner – and it flopped after he and others had sunk money into it for more than a decade. Clemens’s share has been estimated at $150,000 to twice that; in today’s money $3.75 million to $7.5 million.
That, and the failure of a publishing firm that Clemens had founded, sent him and his family out of the Hartford house and into a nomadic life in Europe and beyond during the 1890s. At one point, returning to Hartford while the family remained in Paris, he wrote:
Livy darling, when I arrived in town I did not want to go near the house, & I didn’t want to go anywhere or see anybody. I said to myself, “If I may be spared it I will never live in Hartford again.” But as soon as I entered this front door I was seized 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.
The house, and by extension its city, were scarred forever in August 1896 when daughter Susy, 24 years old and waiting to rejoin her parents in England, died there. Friends still urged them to return: “People in many places are all the while asking us when the Clemenses are coming home,” his close friend, Rev. Joe Twichell, wrote. Livy wrote to friend and confidante Grace King: “I feel much perhaps most of the time as though I could not go back to Hartford.” King replied: “Go back to your old home – to the dear beautiful home in Hartford and take up your life again right there.” In the end, the family’s choice was that expressed by Clemens in a letter to Twichell: “It is not the city of Hartford, it is the city of Heartbreak.”
Toward the end of his life, with his fortunes recouped but with Livy gone, he settled in Connecticut again, but this time in rural Redding, far from the handsome and well-built city he had first seen forty years before.
Anthology Selections
Speech in Honor of Cornelius Walford, Hartford 1874
A Literary Nightmare (or, “Punch, Brothers, Punch”), Atlantic Monthly 1876
Speech on the City of Hartford, 1882
Excerpts from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1884
Excerpts from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Elmira and Hartford, 1889
Samuel L. Clemens/Mark Twain – Biographical and Critical Resources