It Happened Here--The Little Pilot House on the Hill

 

Mark Twain. The name brings to mind the image of a man dressed in a white linen suit, bushy mustache, bushy eyebrows ensconced in a little pilothouse-of-a-study, on a hill overlooking the River, writing – writing about life on the Mississippi, writing about growing up in a little river town along its banks, writing about a boy's great adventure running away from home with a fugitive slave on a raft on that great river, while the smoke curls up from the omnipresent cigar of the writer, and beneath his perch life hurries on in one of the fabled river town (Is it Cairo or Vicksburg, St. Louis or Memphis?)

All of these images ring true, except the last one. The little “pilot house-of-a-study” does not look down on the storied river towns of Cairo or St. Louis, Vicksburg or Memphis. Instead it was located near Elmira, NewYork, overlooking Elmira and the not-so-mighty Chemung river. How did this come to be?

In the summer of 1867, Samuel Clemens, the man behind the emerging persona fell in love – smitten in a classic romantic, Victorian fashion. Clemens was a moderately successful young writer bound for Europe and the Holy Land looking for material for his next book. A fellow passenger, Charles Langdon, showed him a picture of his sister, Olivia Langdon. He could not tear himself away from the image of the slender, doe eyed, child–woman of the photograph, and begged Charley for an introduction when they returned. Eventually, Charles brought his sister Livy to meet the “wild humorist of the Pacific slope” who had shown so much interest in her. Visits and dinners with the family, and carefully chaperoned outings followed. Clemens determined almost immediately she was “the One” and embarked on a formal courtship. 

 

A lengthy engagement followed as Clemens used his money from a successful career as a lecturer, or “platform speaker”, and a loan from Livy's family to buy into a Buffalo newspaper, and embark on a career as a newspaper editor.

 Platform lecturers were a natural outgrowth of the religious revivals of the first half of the nineteenth century, where traveling speakers would preach to audiences in local churches, halls, opera houses, theaters, and even open fields. On their heels came a variety of moral crusaders – abolitionists, temperance advocates, and women's rights advocates, to be followed by spiritualists, scientists, history and travel lecturers feeding an ever-growing appetite for entertainment. Clemens followed his natural ability to entertain people by telling stories.   By the late 1860's his alter ego “Mark Twain” was well along in his development and “Twain” could command a healthy fee of $100 an evening. “Doors open at 7:30, trouble begins at 8:00”, his advertising posters read, and there were plenty of people looking for his kind of “trouble”.

 

While the irreverent, wise-cracking Mark Twain was holding forth on the lecture circuit and had penned numerous newspaper articles and had his first successful books , The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, and The Innocents Abroad, Sam Clemens in his private life longed for the Victorian Era's version of the American Dream.  In Livy he found the perfect Victorian wife who he could idealize and idolize; someone who would make for him a proper home, help him maintain a social life, care for him and bear and raise his children. Clemens would also look to her to reform him; to keep him from drifting into bad habits and curb the wildness in him that ostensibly, every Victorian man, and, especially, the creator of Mark Twain was heir to.  In time Livy would also become Mark Twain's personal editor, censoring any jokes or stories she thought would be too offensive to any segment of his audience. (This would be important because if Mark Twain developed a reputation for being too vulgar, his middle and upper middle class followers – men, and especially women, might abandon him in droves!)  But, at the time of his marriage, a large society wedding, Sam Clemens looked forward to sending Mark Twain into, at least, semi-retirement, while he took up the respectable position of newspaper editor and Livy's family bought them a luxurious three story brownstone mansion in Buffalo.

 But after several years, marred by personal tragedies, Clemens was feeling bored and unfulfilled. Together, Sam and Livy reached a decision.  They would sell the newspaper and the sell large house in Buffalo. They would go to live near several close personal and literary friends in Hartford and Sam would return to writing and platform speaking.
 

Over the next few years they built a whimsical three story house with gables and porches and a tower in East Hartford, and became immersed in the literary and social life of their little community. It became clear, however, that between lecture tours, and social obligations Sam was finding little uninterrupted time to write. Summers provided the only respite when the family left the summer heat of Hartford to stay with Livy's sister, who had inherited from their father a small farm, on the edge of an abandoned limestone quarry in the hills above Elmira. 

Sam marveled at the quiet and the ease with which he could write there. The third summer the family returned to “Quarry Farm,” his sister-in-law had a surprise for him. She had built him a little study, overlooking the old quarry, a hundred yards or so from the main house, away from the hubbub and crying of children, the bustling of servants and the constant stream of visitors. Eight sided, the little study had large windows on every side, and resembled the pilot houses of the old river steamboats where Sam Clemens practiced the profession he loved, so many years before. It was just big enough for a sofa, table and a few chairs; it even had a small fireplace for chilly summer mornings. Sam Clemens loved it, (and so did Mark Twain.) 

The slower pace of life at Quarry Farm, gave Clemens time to sift through the his life's memories for materials he would  use in his two greatest novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Adventure of Huckleberry Finn. The summers at Quarry Farm would lead him to conversations that would profoundly influence his work.

 

In the summer of 1872 he met John T. Lewis a freeborn black man from Maryland who became Twain's model for Jim, the fugitive slave in Huckleberry Finn. The leisurely hours spent with him trading stories of boyhood adventures awakened in Twain the germ of the idea for these books.

Sam Clemens had grown up with slavery and had lived among slaves in his Missouri boyhood home. To some extent he had become inured to the mistreatment whites inflicted on blacks, and his experiences little resembled the catalogue of melodramatic horrors and egregious behaviors that his neighbor in Hartford, Harriet Beecher Stowe, portrayed in her novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. But like most whites, he was largely unaware of the more nuanced and subtly evil and destructive injuries that  slavery, and the racism that continued after slavery, inflicted upon blacks .

Front Porch at Quarry Farm. Elmira

The summer following Clemens conversations with John Lewis, Sam had a chance encounter with Mary Ann “Auntie” Cord, the black cook for the Cranes. What followed was a long conversation with her on the front porch of the main house at Quarry Farm. Clemens had made an off handed comment that she always seemed bright and cheery and from that they fell into a long conversation of the “old times,” before the war. Sam and Livy listened spellbound as “Auntie” Cord described the tender relationships she had had with her husband, and the life-long anguish she felt when she was permanently separated from her husband and seven children by her owners. Clemens was deeply affected and suspended work on his current project to write, in southern black dialect “ A True Story” which he published in the Atlantic Monthly. His friend and editor William Dean Howells would comment, this piece 'leaves all other stories of slave life infinitely far behind.' 
 

Clemens reflections and experiences at Quarry Farm would give a depth and subtlety to his writing and help turn an adolescent adventure story (Huckleberry Finn) into a literary work that  Earnest Heminway would call “the best book we've had...All American writing comes from that.” 

Over the years, a steady stream of writings poured forth from the little study. Twain worked on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (pub.1876), A Tramp Abroad (pub.1880), The Prince and the Pauper (pub.1881), Life On the Mississippi (pub.1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (pub.1885), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (pub.1889) and numerous short pieces and lectures, from his little refuge looking down on Elmira.

In 1952 the little “pilot house on the hill” was moved from Quarry Farm to the center of the Elmira College Campus, to protect it from vandalism, where it continues to inspire young writers and students in the Mark Twain studies program there.