About the Mark Twain House & Museum
Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain, built the house at 351 Farmington Avenue in 1874 to a Victorian Gothic design by architect Edward Tuckerman Potter, and his family lived in it until 1891. The seventeen Hartford years were the most productive of his career: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court were all written while the family lived here. In 1881, after the success of Tom Sawyer, the Clemenses brought in Louis Comfort Tiffany to supervise a redecoration of the interior, and that Tiffany work is a central part of what visitors see on a tour today.
In 1929 the house was rescued from possible demolition when a group called the Friends of Hartford, led by Katharine Seymour Day, acquired the property; that April the Mark Twain Memorial and Library Commission was chartered to preserve it, and from 1930 to 1956 the first floor was rented to the Mark Twain Branch of the Hartford Public Library. The house was declared a National Historic Landmark on December 29, 1962, and a formal room-by-room restoration began in 1963 with the billiard room. The principal rooms were opened in 1974 for the house's centennial, and a further interior restoration followed in 2004 and 2005.
In 2003 the organization opened a 35,000-square-foot museum center beside the house, designed by Robert A. M. Stern and described by the museum as the first LEED-certified "green" museum in the United States. The center houses exhibitions and the museum store, and it anchors a year-round program of author talks, the long-running "Trouble Begins" lecture series and theatrical productions such as a 2026 puppet-and-mask staging of Huckleberry Finn.
Collections and Research Services
The museum's holdings number roughly 50,000 objects, including Clemens manuscripts and letters, historic photographs of the family and the house, original family furnishings and Tiffany glass. The organization also maintains a research library and archive for Twain scholars and students of Gilded Age Hartford; researchers should contact staff through the website before visiting, since the archive is not a walk-in reading room. This is a literary house museum, not a genealogical repository: for Hartford family history, obituaries and city directories, our guides to free family history research and old city directories point to the state and municipal collections that hold them.
Planning Your Visit
The house is shown by guided tour only. According to the museum's visitor page it is open seven days a week with the last tour at 4:15 pm, except that it closes on Tuesdays from January through March. Two kinds of tours run daily, a general house tour and a living-history tour, and the museum warns that tours "sell out days ahead of time," so buy tickets in advance online. Directions, parking details, ticket prices and holiday hours are posted at marktwainhouse.org, or call (860) 247-0998.
Visitors making a longer trip through Connecticut will find a very different kind of history on the coast at Mystic Seaport Museum, the state's maritime museum and shipyard.
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