A Tale of Two Houses

We visited Mark Twain's house in Hartford. It's really a lovely place. Just big enough to be mansion-esque but you can picture a family actually living there. Sort of warm and spacious and comfortable.

It's perched on a bit of a hill and when it was built, a river ran alongside it down the hill. Plus Harriet Beecher Stowe was their neighbor. Lots of trees. Really a pretty place. Unfortunately, you can't take pictures inside and my pictures of the outside are less than impressive. their website isn't much better but you can look it up here.


The best room in the house was - no surprise - the library, which was lined with books on every wall, had a huge fireplace and also opened onto a small greenhouse full of plants with a fountain. His three girls, who sounded like they had a fun adventurous childhood, called it the jungle and played hide and seek in it. If I ever have a house, I'm building that little conservatory into it. :)


There was also a huge fireplace in the library with a long mantle full of chotchkes, sculptures, paintings etc. Every night his girls made him tell them a story using all the pieces on the mantle in order in the story. He "won" the game if he managed to get them so enthralled in the story that he could skip a piece and they didn't notice. If they noticed, he "lost" and had to start over at the beginning of the mantle with a new story.


He was also quite an irascible sort. He named his cats "sin" "satan" and "pestilence" so he could stand on the porch and call for them on Sunday mornings when all his conservative neighbors were going to church. I can only imagine how much he horrified them!


It was a fun visit, full of all his pithy quotes. The best I think was:


"Books are the liberated souls of men."


For comparison, we visited the Winchester Mansion while we were in California. These two houses couldn't be more different.

Mrs. Winchester inherited the Winchester rifle fortune at the turn of the 20th century. A few years later she visited a spiritual medium who told her she was haunted by the souls of all the people who had been killed with a Winchester.

Rather easily influenced, she poured most of her fortune into this mansion. She built in "traps" for the spirits to keep them from finding her.

Like stairs that go nowhere...
Cupboard doors that open onto a blank wall.

Doors that, well, open in several parts and are in no way easy to get through...
Doors of different sizes...

Doors with signs on them that when opened could cause you to fall down 2 stories and hit several roofs on your way.

In short, a crazy place. There were also boarded up doors with fully furnished rooms behind them, a bathroom with only an outside door for access that sits 3 feet off the ground and a fortune in tiffany glass windows that were never installed. In fact there were upwards of 3 million dollars of furnishings stored in rooms below the house, never installed, never unwrapped and never used.

Her will dictated that construction had to be going on in the house 7 days a week to keep the spirits at bay. She also had a thing for daisies and the number 13, just to cover all the superstitious angles. I think she died in bed at the age of 90+.

My next post will be about the show in the high school cafe-gymatorium.

Can't wait, can you?! :)

xox

k