Traveling with Twain

Mark Twain writes in his Quarry Farm gazebo, probaby during the summer of 1874.

Mark Twain first went to Elmira, an industrial city in a dairy-farming area of the Finger Lakes District of western New York, in 1868 to woo Olivia Langdon, daughter of Jervis Langdon, coal-industry baron and wealthiest man in town. Twain and Olivia married in 1870, settling in Hartford, Conn. But Twain wrote many of his most important books—Huckleberry Finn, Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi—during summer family visits to his sister-in-law’s Quarry Farm in Elmira. Twain wrote in a gazebo—12 feet across, with eight sides and a large window on most sides—that looked a bit like the pilot house of a riverboat. The elevated view of the Chemung River Valley, he said, “commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.” The Quarry Farm house is now owned by Elmira College, which houses the Center for Mark Twain Studies. Langdon and Twain family members, including Mark Twain, are buried in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery.

October 7-October 8