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A top a hill not far from downtown Hartford, Connecticut, the house
where Mark Twain raised his family and wrote his best-loved
works stares down at passers-by with an appropriate superiority.
Just as Twain was no typical American, this
late 19th-century gem is no ordinary house. The red-brick
Victorian Gothic mansion, with its seven bedrooms and seven
bathrooms, carriage house and plant-filled conservatory,
was built in 1874 by Edward Tuckerman Potter, an architect
from New York. The home is elaborately decorated with patterned
brick motifs and intricate woodwork. Elaborate decorative
brackets support the gables and eaves of Mark Twain's home
and carriage house.
Fashionable, wealthy, Victorian homes often
included a conservatory, or small green house. At the Mark Twain House, the modest conservatory that extends out from
the library is a round structure, or polygonal conservatory, with glass walls and
pointed glass roof, a floor of crushed stones, and plants,
hanging and potted. All this surrounds a small, in-ground
fountain, its watery spout glinting reflective light. One
must imagine the sound of the water playing over this modest
fountain would have been invigorating. To enter the brick
and glass conservatory, you would pass through double folding
sliding doors fitted with slightly ornamental glass, so as
to break up the uniformity, leaving enough clear glass to
set your eyes on the view of flowers. The most well-lit room
in the house, it boasts more window space for its size than
any other. The plants that filled the conservatory were an
imaginary jungle where Twain pretended to be an elephant
in mock safaris with his children. The retreat into privacy,
the escape into an artificial paradise is what drew the family
to the conservatory. The design and arrangement of the glass
conservatory afforded the Twain family with a view across
the flowered lawns to the neighbouring home. Twain noted
the house "was of us, and we were in its confidence and lived
in its grace and in the peace of its benediction." |
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