Things to Do at Mark Twain House & Museum

The Mark Twain House rises on Farmington Avenue in Hartford's Nook Farm and the first shock is this: it looks nothing like the home of America's folksiest writer. Instead, a 25-room High Victorian Gothic pile in painted brick greets you, crowned by a polychrome slate roof, ornamental chimneys, and a wraparound veranda that architect Edward Tuckerman Potter shaped to echo a Mississippi steamboat. Samuel Clemens lived here from 1874 to 1891, the years when he wrote Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. You can feel the productivity inside. This is the house of a man who, for a spell, was flying high. Cross the threshold and the smell arrives first: old wood, beeswax, the ghost of a cigar lingering after a century of careful preservation. The entrance hall is dim and silvery, paneled in carved wood with stenciled walls executed by Louis Comfort Tiffany's Associated Artists firm in 1881. It is one of the few surviving domestic interiors from that brief, dazzling Tiffany period. Light slips through patterned glass onto a grand staircase, and you will find yourself staring at the ceiling as much as at anything else. What makes the house hit emotionally is the third-floor billiard room where Twain wrote, smoking and pacing and sometimes racking a game when sentences stalled. You can almost hear the click of the balls. The Clemens family lost the house after his publishing house collapsed and his daughter Susy died of meningitis in the upstairs bedroom in 1896. They never lived here again. The house tends to land harder than visitors expect.

The house sits at the corner of Farmington Avenue and Forest Street, about a mile and a half west of downtown Hartford. Driving is easiest. There is a free parking lot on site, accessed from Forest Street. From I-84, take the Sisson Avenue or Sigourney Street exits and follow signs. CTtransit bus routes running west on Farmington Avenue stop within a short walk. The ride from Union Station is roughly 15 minutes. Amtrak and the CTrail Hartford Line both serve Union Station from Springfield, New Haven, and New York. A rideshare from the station runs cheap. Walking from downtown is doable in good weather, about 30 minutes. The route through Asylum Hill has its own faded-grandeur appeal.