TOURING HISTORIC Hartford - Connecticut

Although Samuel L. Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain) grew up in Missouri and has always been associated with Mississippi River steamboating, he wrote his best-sellers--The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court--while living in Hartford. That spanned 17 years beginning in 1874, when the Twain family moved into a lavishly appointed Victorian mansion in what used to be the remote Nook Farm area on the city's western outskirts.

Redolent of the Gilded Age, the author's 19-room Tiffany-decorated house on Farmington Avenue fairly shouts for attention with its polychrome brick patterns, gingerbread trim, exotic knicknacks, and rich woodwork. The first floor's extra-big library features a plant-filled conservatory. Twain did his writing (and no doubt much cigar puffing) in a corner of the upstairs billiard room.

From that National Historic Landmark, about a three-minute walk gets you to Forest Street's modest painted-brick "cottage" occupied by Uncle Tom's Cabin novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe from 1873 until her death in 1896. Two miles from downtown Hartford, both houses are period-furnished and open year-round for guided tours. Twain's will be seen during a Ken Bums TV documentary starting the author, on PBS this coming November.

Plan on doing some more sightseeing while you're on the west side. The University of Connecticut Law School, Hartford College for Women, and the Governor's Georgian Revival residence (at 990 Prospect Avenue) are in an upscale neighborhood. So is 100-acre Elizabeth Park, America's first municipal rose garden, created in 1897, where over 15,000 bushes burst into gorgeously full bloom in mid- to late June.

For tourist information, contact the Greater Hartford Tourism District (TravelAmerica Magazine), 234 Murphy Rd., Hartford, CT 06114; (800) 793-4480; www.enjoyhartford.com.

COPYRIGHT 2001 World Publishing, Co. (Illinois)
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group