The Mark Twain House and Museum is located in Hartford, Connecticut, at 351 Farmington Avenue. The three-story Gothic-style mansion with 19 rooms was built in 1874, and the Clemens family lived there from 1874 to 1891.
During this time, Twain wrote his most famous works: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and others.
Twain commissioned New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design the house, but he came up with many of the details himself. The total area of the house is 14,000 square feet. It has an asymmetrical shape and is built in the Gothic style, with turrets, red and black brick walls laid out in a mosaic pattern, an even more colorful roof, corner rooms with spires and open verandas, and an ornament of butterflies and flowers on the fence. The rooms are arranged in a row: as you enter (not from the street, but at a right angle to it), there is a huge enclosed veranda, then an equally gigantic hall, followed by two living rooms, a library, a dining room, and a round music room designed by a neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Many years later, she helped to set up a greenhouse. There is one bedroom downstairs, the rest are upstairs, along with bathrooms, children’s rooms, a study, and a billiard room.
In 1891, due to financial problems, the Clemens family had to move to Europe, and the house was rented out. In 1896, after the death of her beloved daughter Susie, the huge house became a burden for her relatives. The Twain family no longer wanted to stay in this house and sold it in 1903.
A few years later, a school for boys was opened in the building, after which the house passed into the hands of private owners who rented out apartments. At the end of 1920, real estate speculators who had bought the house began to threaten to demolish the building, which was not recouping the costs of its purchase. A group of Hartford citizens, aware of the historical value of the building, decided to save Mark Twain’s house from destruction.
In 1929, the Mark Twain Memorial Society of Connecticut and the State Library Commission purchased the house. In 1962, the house was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark. Thanks to donations from local residents, extensive renovation and restoration work was carried out, which made it possible to almost completely restore the house to the condition it was in when the Clemens family lived there. The Mark Twain House and Museum was officially opened in 1980-1981, and the restoration and addition of exhibits to the museum continues to this day.
Currently, the museum’s collection includes almost 10,000 exhibits, most of which once belonged to the Clemens family, including a three-ton machine called the “Paige typesetter,” which bankrupted Twain’s company at the time.
In the house-museum, you can see the billiard table where the great writer loved to play in his free time, as well as a large collection of tableware produced by Tiffany. Visitors are also attracted by the beautiful wooden bed that stood in the writer’s bedroom. But, of course, the most fascinating part of the museum is Mark Twain’s library, where you can see his manuscripts, personal photographs, and rare books that belonged to the writer.