2010
Celebrating Hartford's
most famous resident
By Carol Latter

Missouri-born Samuel Clemens was known around the world for his legendary writings, chief among them Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. These two books were vivid and amusing snapshots of life on the banks of the Mississippi River, where Clemens – known as Mark Twain – was born, lived as a boy and later worked as a typesetter, writer and steamboat captain.

But it was in Hartford where he wrote these two books and four others, and it was here that he lived as a newly married man with his wife Olivia, and raised his children. The grand Victorian house they built on Farmington Avenue was truly “home” to him.

“To us, our house was not unsentient matter – it had a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solicitudes and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in its confidence, and lived in its grace and in the peace of its benediction,” he wrote to a friend in 1896. “We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome – and we could not enter it unmoved.”

The house, nearly demolished in the 1920s to make way for a parking lot, was rescued by concerned citizens and later transformed into a museum. It annually welcomes some 60,000 guests from all over the world.

This year, those entrusted with caring for the home – now called The Mark Twain House & Museum – are leading a huge, year long celebration to mark a triple milestone: the 175th anniversary of Twain’s birth, the 100th anniversary of his death, and the 125th anniversary of the U.S. publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“2010 is a big year for us,” said Jacques Lamarre, manager of communications and special projects. While numerous events will be held throughout the year in various locations in the Hartford area, several significant ones have been planned to mark each of those major anniversaries.

To commemorate the Feb. 18, 1885, publishing in the U.S. of Huckleberry Finn, the museum held a February concert presentation of readings from the book, performed by Hartford-based theater troupe Hartbeat Ensemble. The troupe was accompanied by The Ebony Hillbillies. “They’re one of the last all-black string bands 
out of the southern traditions. They normally perform in the New York City subway,” said Lamarre. “Hartbeat is a street theater.” It was an appropriate choice, he added, since Huckleberry Finn, set in the South, “is very gritty.”

The next big event will be the Mark Twain Centennial Séance, set for April 21, the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death. Twain, who became a big believer in paranormal experiences after foreseeing his brother’s death in a steamboat explosion a month before it happened, also accurately predicted his own death.

“When he was born, Halley’s Comet was in the sky, and in 1909, he predicted that when Halley’s Comet returned in 1910, he would likely go out with it,” said Lamarre. True to his prediction, Twain died at his home in Redding of a heart attack a day after the comet made its closest pass to Earth.

This month’s commemorative séance will be conducted by famed New York illusionist Todd Robbins. Robbins, who frequently appears on late-night talk shows and The History Channel, will re-create what it would have been like to attend a séance in the Victorian era. A small group of VIPs will then take a ghost tour with Lorraine Warren, Connecticut’s most famous ghost hunter. Warren, 83, who appears on Paranormal State on A&E, “is going to be taking people through the house to see if Mark Twain might be hanging around on the anniversary of his death.”

A celebratory cake in the shape of the house will be provided by Charm City Bakery, of The Food Network’s popular show, Ace of Cakes.

The séance is a fitting way to mark Clemens’ death, Lamarre said, noting that séances were “really big in the Victorian era. Mark Twain was part skeptic but wanted to believe. He went to séances as a form of entertainment but after his daughter died, he and his wife went to a séance to try to contact her.”

The third anniversary is November 30, Twain’s 175th birthday. “We’re going to be celebrating that night with A Party on the Mississippi, and we’ll be featuring entertainment by River City Slim and the Zydeco Hogs,” he said. Food will be provided, appropriately enough, by Hartford restaurant Ragun Cajun.

This year’s triple celebration, sponsored in large part by The Hartford Financial Services Group, is community-wide. Among the many off-site Twain-related events that will take place this year is the world-premiere adaptation of the first book he wrote while in Hartford. Tom Sawyer, a new play written by Laura Eason and directed by Jeremy B. Cohen, will run from April 1 through May 9 at Hartford Stage.

The production is also tied in with another major activity, said Lamarre. “Hartford Public Library’s 10 branches and over 20 other community libraries from all over the state are doing the National Endowment for the Arts’ Big Read, which is where a community selects a number of recommended books. This year, one of them is Tom Sawyer.” From April through June, the libraries will be encouraging their members to read the book and holding events related to it.

CPTV will be airing 16 hours of Mark Twain documentaries and programming throughout April. And on May 10, Hartford Stage will hold a lecture called “Mark Twain Considered,” featuring three Twain biographers who have new books about him coming out in 2010. Other lectures will be held through the spring and summer, Lamarre said, “and on June 12, we’re doing Tom Sawyer Day at the museum. This will be an all-day family activity, with performances and activities and events for families on the grounds of the museum.”

Fortune and misfortune
This year’s triumphant celebration comes on the heels of several difficult years for The Mark Twain House & Museum, which ran into financial difficulties after building its 33,000-square-foot Museum Center.

Between 1996 and 2005, the museum raised more than $25 million in a capital campaign to pay for ongoing restoration of the house and construction of the state-of-the-art facility, which opened in 2003. But once house restorations were complete, less than $9 million remained to pay for the $18 million center, which cost nearly $5 million more than expected.

To meet the shortfall, the museum took 
out an $11 million bank loan, ending up with 
an annual payment of about $800,000, or 
20 percent of its operating budget.

The museum hoped to offset that with increased revenue from a sharp jump in visitors coming to see the new center and the newly restored servants’ wing, which opened to the public for the first time in 2004.

“The projections for increased attendance were over-anticipated,” explained Lamarre. “They expected a bigger uptick in attendance to the museum, particularly tied to the building of the new convention center. They thought more conventioneers would come to visit, but often, their schedule is so full, they don’t get out of the building that much, and the Star Shuttle [bus] doesn’t come up here.”

To make matters worse, the expense of 
running the building – lights, heating and 
cooling – “was more than our revenue stream could handle.”

At one point, it looked like the combination of higher operating expenses and crippling monthly bank payments might force the museum to close its doors.

Since then, a number of factors have helped to turn the tide. In 2006, the state approved a $3.5 million grant “as part of a comprehensive recapitalization and restructuring of its operations.” In addition, the museum was able to restructure and extend its loan with Webster Bank to make the monthly payments significantly more manageable.

A number of corporations also extended a helping hand. “CL&P and Northeast Utilities and United Technologies all stepped in after the announcement of our financial difficulties, and helped do major reviews of the building’s energy use,” said Lamarre. “CL&P helped switch all of the light bulbs over to LEDs, and it has resulted in the bills coming in at half of what they were before. Now, we’re saving money on a lot of the utility expenses, and we’re working hard to increase attendance to get more earned revenue through the doors so we don’t have this problem again.”

The Hartford Foundation for Public Giving made a significant grant, allowing the museum to hire Vault, a national communications firm, to help with marketing.

“Vault had actually stepped forward when we were having the financial difficulties. They helped spread the word and put together an author’s event to raise money for the museum,” said Lamarre. “Thanks to the Hartford Foundation, we’ve been able to engage their services to tell our story on national level. The foundation is also supporting the creation of a new website that will better tell our story and create a better [online] store, so people around the globe looking for items will be able to find them here. And after severely cutting back the staff of the museum, we’ve been growing the marketing and membership department so we can more aggressively reach out to the community.”

Another serendipitous event was a 2009 visit by a film crew from The Syfy Channel to film an episode of Ghost Hunters, which aired Dec. 2. “We’ve had a huge influx of visitors because of Ghost Hunters,” he said. “There was a lot of activity in the house that night, and they [the Syfy crew] left feeling pretty certain that the house was haunted. We have had guests and staff experience unexplained phenomenon for years.”

Capitalizing on that exposure, the museum has been offering regular Friday night ghost tours of the house, entitled The Graveyard Shift. “It’s been reintroducing the house to people who may have come as a kid. The tours have been selling out every time we have them.”

All in all, the museum has come a long way over the last couple of years. “We’re certainly on the rebound,” he said. “Our visitation was good this past year and a lot of people came to our aid. Like any nonprofit, we’re not out of the woods yet but it’s exciting to go into the centennial year enthusiastic and not feeling the weight of the financial worries we were having before. We like to think of ourselves as trendsetters. We were having an economic collapse before the rest of the country, and we are having a economic recovery before the rest of the country.”

The financial rollercoaster ride of the past few years echoes that of Twain himself, who found himself in financial distress after investments in an invention designed to streamline the printing process ate up much of his book profits and a hefty chunk of his wealthy wife’s inheritance. An attempt to create his own publishing house only deepened their losses.

“The period of 1874-91 was really Twain’s most prolific period, and when he wrote his greatest works. But toward the end of their tenure in the house, he had made a series of really bad investments. His invention, the Paige Compositor, was supposed to revolutionize printing but it was big, unwieldy and expensive. It was a failure, but he kept putting more money into it,” Lamarre said.

“In 1894, he and Olivia were forced to leave the house and do an international lecture tour 
to raise money. While they were gone, their [24-year-old] daughter Susy died in the house of meningitis, and it was too painful for them to move back in. They rented it out and then sold it in 1903.”

Twain’s wife died the following year, and he lived in Redding until his own death six years later.

Better times
For The Mark Twain House & Museum, 2010 marks the beginning of a fresh chapter in a story marked, in turn, by achievement and challenge.

Jeffrey Nichols, who took the helm as executive director two years ago this month after seven years with the museum, said the triple anniversary “means a great deal for us. It really is, I believe, an incredibly significant year, and in many ways, it’s wonderful timing that we have this confluence of anniversaries for the museum. The fact that we have such a full calendar of events, and a large number of organizations involved and supporting us means we will have dividends that will go on through the next couple of years,” he said. “We’re getting the right team in place, the right program in place and people are responding to it.”

He said attendance has been good so far in 2010, and with Vault spreading the word across the country and beyond, “all of these things are coming together and pointing us toward a brighter future. It seems we’re on our way. I’m encouraged and I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Nichols interpreted last year’s grant from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving “as a significant investment in our efforts to preserve the legacy of the Mark Twain House. We’re executing on that strategy; we know it’s going to be a hard fight that we have ahead of us, as does everyone else in this economic climate. As government support wanes – as it has over the past couple of years and will continue to do in the foreseeable future – it’s the arts organizations that adapt to the situation that will be best able to succeed.

“We are becoming nimble; we’re trying new and creative programming and revenue-generating efforts. I believe it is the way forward for us, along with continuing to save on expenses. Driving down energy costs and being careful about what we spend is key.”

Nichols said 100 years after Twain’s death, the house at Nook Farm is an icon of the man and his works.

“In many ways, he was one of the first international superstars to come out of the U.S. He is still world-renowned. And my feeling is that, as we have visitors from all 50 states and 160 nations, he’s still read across the globe and widely respected. His work still has something to say. The importance of the book Huckleberry Finn points to the need to continue to address race and class and other issues; we’re a very safe place to do that,” he said.

“I think another reason people love Mark Twain and want to come visit this home is because he really defined the sense of American childhood,” added Lamarre. “His books bring people back to a nostalgic place. The other thing is, he is incredibly funny and fun to read, so I think there’s a very positive association in 
people’s minds.”

Nichols noted that Twain’s editor and friend, William Dean Howells, referred to the author upon his passing as “ ‘the Lincoln of our literature.’ There’s a need for us to tell his story and what an important part of our 
history, and world 
history, he was. 
We have this legacy in our midst. Other places a have a claim to Mark Twain, but it was here that he built his home.”

International interest in the man and the home remain high; the museum recently received inquiries from three German reporters, planning to come to Hartford to do stories independently of one another.

Surprisingly, said Lamarre, many people living in Connecticut tend to take The Mark Twain House & Museum for granted. “I’m shocked at the number of people who have either never been here or came as a child and haven’t been back for years. When it’s in your backyard, you tend to forget what you have. Folks from around the globe are interested in coming here. But we have to remind [locals] of what we have and why it’s important, and encourage them to come with greater frequency. Having more events, I think, will help drive people through our doors.”

Chief curator Patti Philippon said those who feel they’ve seen the museum should know that the house and its contents, along with the exhibits at the Museum Center, are constantly evolving. And since a single tour couldn’t possibly cover all of Mark Twain’s colorful life and varied interests, each tour is different.

The museum also creates activities to interest visitors of all ages. “From kids to teens to adults, we’ve pretty much got something for everyone.” She said many people are fascinated to see gadgets that the adults may remember from their grandparents’ house, or that children may have never seen the likes of. Some find it hard to contemplate a home that has never had a telephone, television or computer. Teens are fascinated by the ghost tours, while youngsters enjoy special LEGO-related activities.

This year, more than ever, added Nichols, “I hope people come out to enjoy some of the programs we have to offer.” These 30 special events and activities, along with thematic exhibits that chronicle Twain’s life and the impact of his books on pop culture and writing since his death, offer “a wonderful chance to reconnect with Mark Twain and the museum, and rediscover why he is important to the world.” HM

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