USA > Connecticut > Hartford County > History of Hartford County, Connecticut, 1633-1928, Volume I > Part 31
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When in 1860 Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900), a native of Plainfield, Mass., gave up his law practice in Chicago at the request of his Hamilton College classmate, Joseph R. Hawley,
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to be editor with him of the Press, he occupied a cottage near Mr. Hooker's where Mrs. Edward Hooker, mother of John, had been living. Later Mr. Warner removed to the brick house Thomas C. Perkins had built, across Hawthorn Street from Hooker's and also still standing.
It was there, while editor on the Courant with Mr. Hawley, that Mr. Warner whimsically tried his hand at gardening and wrote his papers which, when published in 1871 as "My Summer in a Garden," brought him his first literary fame.
Samuel L. Clemens, "Mark Twain" (1835-1910), a native of Florida, Mo., was stopping at Mr. Hooker's house at this time while reading the proof of his first book for his publishers, the American Publishing Company. Meanwhile, he and Mr. War- ner together wrote "The Gilded Age" which Mr. Clemens suc- cessfully dramatized. Mr. Warner's brother, George H. Warner, also of literary proclivity, married Mr. Gillette's daughter Elisa- beth, for whom Mr. Gillette built a house a little north of his in what was then the popular "Gillette Woods," a wonderful cluster of chestnuts, beeches and oaks. On the death of Mr. Gillette in 1879, his daughter and her husband returned to the homestead where they lived until 1904, and on removing South continued to own it till they sold it to Lucius F. Robinson, 2d, Prof. Henry A. Perkins and John M. Gallup in 1921, they being adjoining residents. Mr. Warner, the author, removed to the house his brother had occupied, and that was his residence till his death in 1900; after that, the residence of his wife till her death and of Miss Mary Barton, a member of the family who with her brother, Philip P. Barton, now owns it. Mr. Hawley in the earlier days was living near his former law partner, Mr. Hooker, south of Hawthorn Street.
In 1873, Mr. Clemens built a house in this same grove on the river bluff, on Farmington Avenue, giving a deck and pilot- house effect to the front, in recollection of his steamboat days. The kitchen part of the house looked toward Farmington Ave- nue-the front toward Mr. Warner's house with the grounds of which it was connected by a well beaten path. The house was unique in certain of its features, including its billiard room. Here, with his local friends and those from a distance, he enjoyed life to the utmost till, after buying out his New York publishers,
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Mark twain
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SAMUEL L. CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN) America's greatest humorist
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Charles L. Webster & Company, and after the success of Grant's "Memoirs," fate turned against him.
A heavy investment in an unsuccessful typesetting machine contributed to financial disaster in 1894. To him and Mrs. Clem- ens, a much more serious loss was sustained in the death of their oldest daughter, Susan, who died at the home here while Mr. Clemens with his wife was on a lecture tour of the world earning money to pay his creditors. The money raised and debts paid, a dinner was given in his honor in New York. During this time of grief and hardship he had written "Joan of Arc," "Pudd'n Head Wilson" and other books, and had been honored with the degree of Litt. D. at Yale and, in 1907, at Oxford. He could not bring himself to return to his old home; instead he traveled much and built an Italian villa at Redding, Conn. His daughter Clara married Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Russian pianist. In the sketch of his life published after his death, his recollection of one or two Hartford men and incidents was faulty. The judgment of liter- ateurs today is that he was the greatest humorist of his times- if not of any times.
Mr. Warner was editor and his brother George an assistant editor of the "Library of the World's Best Literature," the last great work which Mr. Clemens' publishing house undertook and was obliged to pass on to another. As editor of the "Editor's Drawer" and then as editor of the "Editor's Study" of Harper's Magazine Mr. Warner continued till his death. His earlier works were luminous descriptions of his travels in Oriental lands. Col- lections of essays vied in popularity with his novels like "A Little Journey in the World," "The Golden House" and "That For- tune." He gave much of his time to the cause of uplift for the col- ored race and at home was a member of the park board and of the state sculpture commission. His connection with the Cour- ant is taken up at the time of his death.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), daughter of Lyman Beecher and Roxanna Foote, wife of Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, was born in Litchfield, but of the many places she lived in, Hartford was the only one she called home. Most of her "teens" she was here, as pupil and as teacher in the school of her sister Catherine. With her she helped establish a seminary in Cincinnati, after her father had gone there to Lane Theological Seminary. The wife of the distinguished Professor Stowe, in Cincinnati, at Bowdoin
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College and at Andover Theological Seminary, rearing a family of six children, nursing them through a cholera epidemic while she herself was far from well, suffering pangs of poverty and writing industriously for periodicals, and withal taking deeply to heart the glimpses she caught of slavery across the Ohio, she was sending the most cheerful letters to her brother Henry Ward Beecher, her invalided husband and other members of the large family and, when she could, getting to Hartford to visit her sister Mary, Mrs. Thomas C. Perkins of Nook Farm. Her first earnings of importance were $300 she received in 1851 from the National Era of Washington, of which John G. Whittier was cor- responding editor. This was for her serial, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." The enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act was what drove her to make the time to write the story. It appeared at a period when the methods of the extreme abolitionists were dis- affecting many; it united millions in this country and in Europe in the belief that human beings could not be property. Her work in assembling data, much more laborious than the writing, came during the months at the Bowdoin College town of Brunswick, Me., when she was carrying on single-handed for her whole fam- ily and teaching outside. The 10 per cent royalty on the story in book form yielded $10,000 in four months, after which it was an Aladdin's lamp. She was welcomed by royalty in England and visited other countries where high and low paid her honor. In the meantime her other books were coming out, quaintly pic- turing New England life. Literary celebrities of every land were in intimate correspondence with her; James Russell Lowell was writing that it was her genius in her first book still more than the moral which had appealed to him, and her subsequent books confirmed his judgment.
So it was in 1863 that she strolled down into the fine grove of oaks and ash trees by Park River where the Underwood and Merrow plants now are, and said to her builder, "This is the spot that I haunted as a girl. I said if I ever could have a home it must be here." But the beautiful home, visited by thousands of distinguished friends and many of the lowliest, was elbowed by Hartford's fast-spreading factories. From it ran a shady road northwesterly, up the knoll to where her sister Mrs. Perkins lived, and across the road from her-as has been said-was her half-sister Isabella, wife of John Hooker. Her house and also
WINTER VIEW OF SCENE OF CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER'S FIRST BOOK "MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN" Hawthorn Street, Hartford
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
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the one at Mandarin, Fla., where she spent the winters, was peculiar as to its front gables; on Forest Street, not far from Farmington Avenue and but an easy step from "Belle's" and "Mary's" was a brick house with much the same peculiarity; any one of the three would suggest the others. In 1873 she chose that for home for the rest of her life. There on beloved Nook Farm she wrote for a time, there she received her honoring guests, there she marked the passing of her older friends and relatives-her husband in 1886-and there she dreamed out her last days till July 1, 1896.
The Warners, Clemens, Perkins, the Stowes, the Hookers, Twichell, Editor Clark, Rev. Nathaniel J. Burton, Doctor Par- ker, the Hamersleys, J. Hammond Trumbull, the Beechers, Olm- sted, the Footes and Hawleys, Henry C. Robinson-those who did not reside on the farm came there-and Howells, Olcott, Cable, Matthews, the T. B. Aldriches, the Fields, George William Curtis, Professor Lounsbury, the surviving "communists" of Brook Farm near Concord, Dickens and other writers from Eng- land, men of Trinity and Yale, and Harvard not barred, Bunce, Flagg, Brandegee and fellow artists, Modjeska, later Paderewski and other musicians drawn by Mrs. Warner, herself a queen among them, and Thomas Nelson Page, Sarah Orne Jewett, Al- den, Rev. Dr. Anderson, Roosevelt-the joy in the life there at Nook Farm was the informality. Any of them might be drop- ping in on any one of the others at any hour, always welcome, morning or evening, unless it was at Clemens' when he was walk- ing around his billiard table, plotting his next chapter; he was the most versatile talker, in his high, drawling tones, but the sub- ject must be to his taste-which luckily was broad and varie- gated. Several of the Hartford men were also members of the Monday Evening Club which began in the '60s, meeting at each other's houses.
The wives were thoroughly congenial. And there were the children. "Will" Gillette starting on his road to fame by ar- ranging theatricals in his father's barn-that barn once a sta- tion in the "underground railroad" for slaves on the way to Can- ada-building a steam engine or carving a chair, or winning the high school declamation prize; "Dick" Burton, the poet and future professor of literature and for several years living in the house he built near Mr. Warner's-frisky in his school and Trin-
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ity College days, and tall "Ed" (Dr. Edward B.) Hooker leading the way to the swimming hole with Rob and John Porteus. "They keep me in good form," said Mr. Warner and wrote "Being a Boy." Clemens filled his house with the boys of his memory, his "Tom Sawyers" and "Pudd'n Head Wilsons."
Clemens took the stage once himself, cast for a part in a com- edy played by amateurs in 1876, for the benefit of the Allyn Library. And it was in a Mark Twain play, "The Gilded Age," that Gillette made his first professional appearance here the year before, at Roberts Opera House. The date is worth preserving- January 11 and 12, 1875, John T. Raymond as "Colonel Sellers." Gillette's sturdy father had not favored the stage for his tall boy. But the boy had ideas of his own and while still at New York University, at the age of nineteen, he began using them, gaining a place with a St. Louis stock company. He got home again safely. Clemens gave ear to him and soon he was per- forming at the Globe in Boston. He had done himself credit in "Faint Heart Ne'er Won Fair Lady" before he began in New York with the book Mr. Clemens had dramatized. None of the many receptions accorded him by his home town in the plays of his own writing, like "The Private Secretary," "The Professor" or "Held By the Enemy" or "Secret Service" or "Too Much John- son," or his adaptations like "Sherlock Holmes" could ever have been more gratifying to him than that first one.
Nook Farm ever has continued to have its charm for literary people and lovers of music. Prof. Henry A. Perkins of Trinity writes much upon science and education; Prof. Lewis B. Paton of the Seminary Foundation is a well known writer on theological and archaelogical subjects; John M. Gallup has been one of the city's leading organists; Prof. Robert B. Riggs, lately dean of the Trinity faculty, is a promoter of scientific literature and Mrs. Riggs a patron of art; Col. Francis Parsons, lawyer, news- paper man and now vice chairman of the board of the Hartford Bank and Trust Company, has written masterly stories and sketches; Arthur P. Day, chairman of the board of the Hartford- Connecticut Trust Company, is an artist and a collector of lit- erature, as also is Paul G. Merrow, though both shrink from pub- licity ; the late W. O. Burr, proprietor and editor of the Times, had his home here, now Mrs. Burr's; Miss Mabel Wyllys Wain-
SENATOR FRANCIS GILLETTE'S HOUSE, HARTFORD
HOME OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, HARTFORD
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wright, descendant of the proprietor of 1639, is a devotee to music; Miss Lucy Perkins, daughter of Mary Beecher Perkins, has delightful literary style.
The neighborhood, about which more will be said in connec- tion with the Mark Twain Memorial, draws many visitors, espe- cially from foreign lands. It is rich in the lore of those who have passed on. Two of the less familiar quotations from Mark Twain may be given in illustration and as history items. On his first visit to the city he wrote :
"Hartford is the place where the insurance companies all live. They use some of the houses for dwellings. The others are for insurance offices. So it is easy to see that there is quite a spirit of speculative enterprise here. Many of the in- habitants have retired from business but the others labor along in the old customary way, as presidents of insurance companies."
President Bliss of the local publishing house produced "Inno- cents Abroad," Mr. Clemens' first book, against the judgment of his directors. After it was off the press the author wrote to an old steamboat associate:
"Thirty tons of paper have been used in publishing my book. It has met with a greater sale than any book ever pub- lished, except 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'-not so bad for a scrub pilot, is it?"
Rev. S. Dryden Phelps was living here in this period, formerly a Suffield clergyman but coming here from New Haven in 1876 as editor of the widely circulating Christian Secretary. He was well known as a writer on religious subjects and was the author of several familiar hymns. His son, William Lyon Phelps, born in 1865, was to take his place in literature in the next generation and to become essay-writer, critic and professor of literature at Yale, an ordained Baptist clergyman and a doctor of divinity.
There were and are other names marked in literature in that period and on. A shortened list of them would include John Fiske, the historian who had gone from here, his birthplace; Annie Eliot Trumbull, daughter of Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull,
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who writes poetry and fiction; Rose Terry Cooke, novelist and poet; Rev. Henry Clay Trumbull, brother of Doctor Trumbull, for many years editor of the Sunday School Times and writer of books; Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, who was born here in 1833; Frederick Beecher Perkins, born here in 1829, who chose both education and fiction for his field; William Graham Sumner of Yale, of Hartford birth (1840) ; Mary K. Talcott, delving into history; Sarah Pratt McLean Greene of Simsbury, with her "Cape Cod Folks," "Everbreeze" and other stories of life along the coast; Prof. Charles F. Johnson of Trinity; Rev. Dr. William L. Gage; Clyde Fitch, dramatist; Winchell Smith, playwright and international producer; Charles Dillingham, theatrical manager; Prof. Richard Burton, poet, lecturer, professor of English at University of Minnesota, now head of the New York Drama League; Capt. Louis F. Middlebrook whose two volumes on "Maritime History of Connecticut During the Revolution" cover hitherto unexplored territory; Philip Curtis, now of Norfolk, novelist; Col. Emerson G. Taylor, in fiction, war history and for- eign correspondence, and Wilbur F. Gordy, educator, supervis- ing principal of Hartford schools (1884-1904), superintendent of schools in Springfield (1904-1911), chairman of the Hartford Board of Education many years till 1928, who, among his sev- eral historical writings, produced the most widely known school history of the United States.
Mark Twain in 1876 was one of the first users of the tele- phone in Hartford. Isaac D. Smith, Mr. Clemens' favorite drug- gist, in the old Hotel Capitol at the corner of Main Street and Capitol Avenue, was perhaps the first in the country to operate a telephone exchange. His first wires he ran to Doctors P. D. Peltier and John A. Stevens, then to Mr. Clemens, General Haw- ley and the Courant. Messages telephoned were retelephoned by the clerk, John M. Knox, till Mr. Smith devised a switch and sub- stituted for the old coffin board a regular switchboard, which was a marvel. In October, 1877, Graham Bell, then New Eng- land superintendent, wrote Mr. Smith that the telephones to be sent him were "for the first telephone line which fully embodies the central office idea." New Haven had a station in 1878, soon after which the manager there took over Smith's humble begin- nings. Knox, who installed Mark Twain's telephone, used to tell
RESIDENCE OF GEORGE W. MERROW, HARTFORD Built by John Hooker. Was Mark Twain's first Hartford home
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RESIDENCE OF SAMUEL CLEMENS (MARK TWAIN), HARTFORD
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how the humorist raved against anybody who would undertake to extend the reach of the human voice; a gag would be a better device. Clemens told his intimates that Professor Bell begged him to invest $500 in the telephone project but he drove him away, saying that he had only just been parted from good money by a man with an invention, and next day loaned $5,000 to a friend who went bankrupt within a week.
Edison's invention of a talking machine was exhibited at Allyn Hall June 11, 1878. The audience, according to the press, was astounded and delighted. The sound waves were recorded on tinfoil on a cylinder and by the turning of a crank the words were reproduced.
The very next day there was the first local exhibition and flight of an airship. It was at Colt meadows near where the aviation field is now. The performer was Professor Richtel who had advertised his "flying car-Only Reliable 'Air Line' to All Parts of the World." Previously he had given exhibitions in- doors. The car was a cylindrical bag filled with gas. In an at- tachment beneath, the man with his feet worked pedals and thereby controlled a propeller at the end of the bag, turning one way to go up and the reverse to come down. He had waited four days for good weather. The flight was perfect and returning from over the Connecticut he landed directly and easily at the feet of his manager. Two days later he flew to Newington, six miles, and on the way, came down almost to the ground near Charles Schultz's house, got a drink of water without landing, rose quickly into the air and continued. He stopped at Newing- ton because his legs were tired. Richtel told the press he expected to show that navigation of the air could readily be effected.
A day still to be counted as one of the county's most me- morable was Battle-Flag Day on the anniversary of Antietam, September 17, 1879. The occasion, by direction of the Legis- lature, was the removal of the battle flags from the old arsenal to the cases that had been prepared for them in the west corridor of the new Capitol. General Hawley was marshal, Maj. J. C. Kin- ney chief of staff. Among the military guests were Generals Burnside, Schofield, Franklin, Warren and Benham. Including
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a battalion of 1,000 who had gone to the war from other states, there were nearly 10,000 army and navy veterans in line, rep- resenting every regiment. The escort consisted of the First Con- necticut National Guard (Col. Lucius A. Barbour), dressed in new uniform of helmets, dark blue frock coats and sky-blue trousers, scarlet facings; First Company (Maj. C. B. Board- man) and Second Company (Maj. C. W. Blakeslee) Governor's Horse Guard; First Company (Capt. G. B. Fisher) and Second Company (Capt. J. G. Phile) Governor's Foot Guard, and the Putnam Phalanx (Maj. F. M. Brown). The flags had been pre- pared to bear transportation, unfurled, by a committee of ladies including Mrs. Joseph R. Hawley whose service in the field had endeared her to thousands of soldiers. The several arches and the decorations on buildings were the most lavish ever seen here. For the most part the flags were carried by men who had carried them in the war, and at the Capitol it was they who bore them in to their resting places. In many instances there were two stands of colors, the original and those with which it had been necessary to replace them. The federal flag of the Sixteenth was made up of the pieces the men had torn it into and had secreted in their clothing when enduring prison life after their capture at Ply- mouth. The pieces had been beautifully mounted on white silk for this event.
In his address presenting the colors, General Hawley said :
"It is quite certain that we shall never again be sum- moned as battalions, with trumpet and drum, banner and cannon, for even a noble holiday like this. Let the flags rest. In a few years these men will no longer be able to bear arms for the land they love, but these weather-worn and battle- torn folds shall remain through the centuries testifying that Connecticut was true to free government, and pledging her future fidelity."
Governor Charles B. Andrews in accepting the custody for the state closed his address with these words:
"Lovingly, then, and tenderly, let us lay them away in the motherly arms of the state whose trophies they now be- come, that they may teach these lessons of patriotism and of duty to all future generations."
BARN ON PREMISES OF LUCIUS F. ROBINSON, JR., HARTFORD
An "underground railway" station for escaping slaves in abolition days, when Francis Gillette owned the place
RESIDENCE OF COLONEL FRANCIS PARSONS Forest and Hawthorn streets, Hartford
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RESIDENCE OF MRS. WILLIE O. BURR Farmington Avenue and Forest Street, Hartford
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The regimental tents were in the east part of Bushnell Park; the dining tents were in the west part and the collation the citi- zens had provided, like the fund they had raised, was generous. The men sang and marched to the music of "Marching Through Georgia," which was written by H. C. Worth, a Hartford boy. In the evening the Capitol was illuminated by candles and the arches by gas while the Brush Light Company, through the kind- ness of the Willimantic Linen Company, gave an exhibition of their new 3,000 candle-power electric lights from the top of the Capitol, the rays of which were seen eighteen miles away. Hart- ford's population then was 40,000; the railroads transported 60,000 that day and it was estimated that nearly 50,000 more came in by their own conveyances.
Though naturally this was not among the comments at such time of almost religious solemnity, the town found that it sud- denly had developed a new power of social entertainment. Among the guests were many of note aside from the veterans and their immediate friends, all of whom were so bountifully provided for, and in the over-crowded community somewhere must be a place for them, such as today is considered a matter- of-fact adjunct. The Hartford Club met the requirement. It had been in existence only since 1874 when it was incorporated by General Hawley, Dr. W. A. M. Wainwright, Samuel W. White, General Franklin, Frederick W. Russell, J. Watson Beach, Charles M. Pond, Col. F. W. Cheney and C. S. Weath- ersby. In lieu of the old-time inns it had furnished a place where affairs of business moment could be thrashed out and plans be formulated for anything requiring cooperation of the community, like this. In its first days, occupying the former Wadsworth residence, it had made a worthy beginning, but after it had built its present establishment across Prospect Street, it took fully its place as an institution. Today sees the expansion of clubs along other specific lines, social, fraternal, collegiate, professional and the rest, but the Hartford Club, like its prototype in other cities, remains the one in which the public has something akin to civic interest.
Banking in particular was shaping itself to the new require- ments. The Connecticut Trust Company in 1868 was the first of its kind, followed by the Hartford in 1871, the Security in
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1875, the Riverside in 1907, and the Park Street; and the banks, like the City, the State, the Mutual, and the United States were to add the important word "trust" as time went on, till today there are these great organizations and consolidations, mention of which belongs to the final period of the history. In savings banks, in the '70s and now, there were three in addition to the original Society of Savings, promoting and ready to receive the benefits of post-war dependability when such a thing was so essential to progress-the State (1858), and the Mechanics and Dime (1861).
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