Mark Twain moved into his Hartford, Connecticut house in 1874. The home at 351 Farmington Avenue became the residence of Samuel Clemens, his wife Olivia, and their children from 1874 to 1891.
Twain had first visited Hartford in 1868 while working with publisher Elisha Bliss of the American Publishing Company. After briefly living in Buffalo, the Clemens family rented a house in Hartford’s Nook Farm neighborhood in 1871. They then commissioned architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design a larger home, financed partly by Olivia Clemens’s inheritance.
The house was built in a distinctive Victorian Gothic style, sometimes popularly compared with a riverboat. Twain wrote several major works there, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. The family left Hartford in 1891 after financial difficulties, although Twain continued to regard the house as one of his finest homes.