5.28.17
Mark Twain's House
Harriet Beecher Stowe's house is right across the back yard...
From the Orange County Register website:
One afternoon in 1876, Samuel Clemens crossed his yard to visit his neighbor, Harriet Beecher Stowe. When he returned, his wife chided him for having gone out without a cravat.
Clemens, known to the world by his pen name, Mark Twain, promptly placed a tie on a tray and had his butler deliver it to Stowe with a note apologizing for his faux pas. Stowe replied immediately, quipping that Clemens had discovered a new principle – right up there with Sir Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation – “that a man can call by installments.”
The anecdote, drawn from documents in the Stowe and Twain libraries, gives a glimpse into the relationship between these two famous authors, who shared so many interests and whose houses are but a few yards apart in a section of Hartford known as Nook Farm.
The houses, however, could not be more different. The Stowe house, where she spent the last 20 years of her life, is a modest Victorian cottage. It seems the home of a proper Victorian housewife, not the author of one of the most important literary works of the time, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” or “the little woman who wrote the book that started this Great War,” as President Lincoln described Stowe when they met.
Twain’s house is an ode to ostentation. The man who thumbed his nose at social customs in his later years – he called the white suit he insisted on wearing year round his “don’t-care-a-damn” suit – was almost obsessive about showcasing his material success in the 19-room mansion he had built by architect Edward Tuckerman Potter, best known for his churches, and decorated by Louis Comfort Tiffany and his partners in Associated Artists.
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