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Arts and Leisure

Edward Gorey House: A Quirky Cape Cod Museum

The Edward Gorey House may not be what you think about when you think “Cape Cod house museum.”

On the other hand, the Cape’s appeal to free thinkers and quirky artists might mean the Edward Gorey House is exactly what you expect from a Cape Cod house museum.

You’ll definitely find free thinking and quirky at 8 Strawberry Lane in Yarmouth Port. Two signs posted at the entrance give you an idea of what to expect. One says, “Please, no mayonnaise.” The other says, “Please, No Henry James.” Gorey hated the 19^th century author, but reread his books to remind himself how much he hated him.

Gorey in his kitchen, 1999. He must have tidied.

The Edward Gorey House

You have probably seen Edward Gorey’s art — detailed ink drawings of Victorian and Edwardian characters in absurd or macabre settings. His books have titles like The Glorious Nosebleed, The Gashlycrumb Tinies and Always One Button Short.

He wrote and illustrated more than 100 of them. He also designed theatrical costumes, book covers and playbills, wrote plays and created the animated introduction to PBS’s Masterpiece Theater’s Mystery!

Gorey especially loved Agatha Christie mysteries

In 1978, Gorey won Tony Awards for his costume and set designs for the Broadway play, Dracula. With his royalties from the play he bought a 200-year-old sea captain’s cottage on the Yarmouth Port Common. Gorey remodeled the house, leaving the wide pine floorboards and enlarging the rooms. He had cabinets built for his many, many collections.

On weekends he would fold his six-foot frame into a yellow Volkswagen Bug and drove it to yard sales, antique shops and used bookstores. Undoubtedly he visited Parnassus just down the street. He then brought his found treasures home, where he put them in his wunderkammers – cabinets of wonder. You could say without fear of contradiction that Edward Gorey had hoarding tendencies.

The Clutter

He found inspiration for his surrealistic and witty drawings in cheese graters, Japanese cinema, French surrealism, insects, old children’s books, frogs and decorative rocks – to name a few. The curators have cleared out some of the clutter in the house and organized it.

In Gorey’s large TV room at the back of the house you can watch the Mystery! Trailer on a large-screen television. The TV probably didn’t exist during his lifetime (1925-2000). He almost certainly would have bought a big one had he lived longer, as he loved television: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Frasier, The Golden Girls and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Along with a sample of his collections, the five-room museum brims with his work in the form of drawings, sketchbooks and 3-D manifestations, like the five-foot-tall stuffed creature standing at the kitchen sink.

You won’t see the second floor, but you will see his downstairs bathroom (there’s a skeleton in the shower). The Gorey House has no velvet ropes, no rooms blocked with Plexiglas. You’re free to wander. And you can leaf through his sketchbooks for Mystery!, stroke his fur coats, touch his typewriter. You’ll only see a tiny portion of the 26,000 books he collected, though.

Exhibits change every year, and the house is open to visitors from early April through December (check the website for hours). Gorey loved animals (especially cats) and insects, and the Edward Gorey House has a mission raising awareness of animal welfare.

And yes, it has a gift shop.

Getting To the Edward Gorey House

One of the best things about the Gorey House is getting there. It stands just off the King’s Highway – also known as Route 6A.

Old Kings Highway in Barnstable Village

The highway runs east-west along the northern part of Cape Cod. Originally a Wampanoag path, it evolved into a colonial cart path and now a scenic byway. It comprises the largest contiguous historic district in the United States. You’ll see stone walls, salt marshes, sea captain’s houses, antique shops, cemeteries, tidal flats, general stores, cranberry bogs and restaurants. It runs from Bourne to Orleans, but the prettiest section stretches from East Sandwich through Barnstable and Yarmouth Port.

Gorey’s favorite restaurant, Jack’s Outback, is still in operation nearby, though it’s located in a different building than it was during his lifetime. You can find it at 161 Main Street.

Five Things You’ll Remember From Your Visit

Snapshots

Throughout the house, framed snapshots of Edward Gorey give a sense of the man. They show him at garden parties, on the beach and asleep on his sofa surrounded by cats.

Gorey signing an autograph at Jack’s Outback

Fur Coats

Gorey stood over six feet tall and wore full length fur coats, along with sneakers, jeans, heavy jewelry and a Harvard scarf. The museum displays a collection of his fur coats on a rack.

Edward Gorey had quite a look going.

Stuffed Creature at Sink

As you might expect from Edward Gorey, a hodgepodge of random objects fills the kitchen, covers the counters and line the fireplace mantle. A five-foot-tall stuffed penguin-like bird – the fruit of Gorey’s imagination – stands at the sink. Gorey’s mismatched china fills the dish drainer on the kitchen counter.

A Gorey creation

The Framed Waffle

Among the many framed items on the wall is a waffle. Is it a real waffle or fake? Somehow in the Gorey house it doesn’t matter.

The collections

Gorey stuffed the house with his collections. The curators have thinned them out, so what you see are countless ceramic frogs and rocks. He apparently inherited the collecting bug from his mother, who saved his childhood ephemera – on display in a Wunderkammer.

Images: Mannequin dressed in Gorey clothes By EgorovaSvetlana – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=135673887. Route 6A By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15491118/

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The Boyhood Home of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If ever there was a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth, it was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Yet far from using his birthright as a ticket to a dissolute life, Longfellow combined his family connections and his exceptional intellect to become the most famous poet in the world.

Longfellow’s career began in Portland, Maine (Massachusetts at the time) where he grew up in a house originally built in 1785-1786 for his maternal grandfather, Revolutionary War general Peleg Wadsworth. The house was built in a neoclassical style of brick, one of the earliest brick structures in Maine. Originally the house had two stories, but a third story was added after a fire in 1814. That made it big enough to accommodate the large family. At times as many as 12 people lived in the house.

The Wadsworth family can trace its roots in America to the Mayflower. The Longfellow family, meanwhile, traced its roots to England via William, Henry’s great-great grandfather. He was a soldier who came to Nova Scotia as part of a British military force. Henry’s grandfather served as a judge and his father a congressman.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

These two families came together in the marriage of Stephen Longfellow and Zilpah Wadsworth, who in 1807 would take up residence in the Wadsworth home at 489 Congress Street in Portland. Henry was eight months old then. He would live there until he left for Bowdoin College at 14, and he would call it home for 35 years. Henry mastered three foreign languages and returned to Bowdoin, after touring Europe, to teach. He would later take a position at Harvard College until he gave up teaching and turned his attention to writing full time.

The house played an important role in shaping Longfellow’s life. In the house he first got the notion to make writing his profession, rather than law or medicine or business. His father did not fully support his plan, given the unlikelihood that he could support himself as a writer.

Longfellow would prove his father’s doubts wrong, and by no small measure. He became the best known poet in the English-speaking world in his lifetime, writing works such as “Paul Revere’s Ride,” “The Song of Hiawatha” and “Evangeline.”

People of all walks of life appreciated Longfellow’s work. When he was in his sixties in 1868, Queen Victoria received him. The queen was surprised to see her servants clamoring for a glimpse of him.

Longfellow died in 1882 and lived most of his adult life in Cambridge, Mass. But his childhood home in Maine retained a place in his heart, and he visited regularly until the year before he died.

Anne Longfellow Pierce, Henry’s sister, preserved the family home in much the state it was in when Peleg Wadsworth had lived in it. In her will, she bequeathed the house, land and many furnishings to the Maine Historical Society upon her death in 1901. The society has operated it as a museum ever since. A visit takes you on a remarkable trip back in time to the early days of Maine and Longfellow’s life.

Rear of the Wadsworth-Longfellow house shown from the garden.

Five Things You’ll Never Forget if you Visit

The Pitcher in the Summer Dining Room

On one shelf in the summer dining room rests a blue-and-white pitcher made around 1800 in memory of George Washington. The pitcher was used to serve lemonade each year on the Fourth of July. It has sat on the shelf for well over 100 years.

The summer dining room

The Waiting Room

For about 10 years beginning in 1815, Stephen Longfellow operated his law office in the house’s front sitting room. A new side entrance and vestibule were built as a sitting room for clients. It was a place Henry often used to study and write. He was not happy when the family remodeled the room to make it a china closet after his father moved his law office out of the house.

Childhood Desk of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The second-story back bedroom contains a number of items from the Longfellow children’s day, including a pine child’s desk, worn and scribbled with graffiti, that dates to the school years of the Longfellow children.

Handprints in the Hall

In the rear hallway of the house, the plaster bears one of the most tangible reminders of the Wadsworth children. On the wall you can see the handprint in the plaster and the inscription “Eliza Wads-worth.” It belongs to Zilpah’s sister who died at the age of 22. Elizabeth Wadsworth not only was a favorite of Zilpah, who nursed her through her young life, but she was also thought to be betrothed to Stephen Longfellow. She died, however, before they married. It was after Elizabeth’s death that Zilpah and Stephen would marry.

Zilpah’s Wallpaper

Zilpah’s chamber on the second floor was a room that Henry’s mother spent many hours in. While much of the mansion is typical of what you might expect of an old New England home, Zilpah’s room reflects her colorful tastes, especially on the wall. The bright blue French wallpaper features a trellis and floral design that look very un-New England.

Visiting the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Childhood Home

The Wadsworth-Longfellow House is open for tours May through October. Information about the house is available at its website.

Summer dining room image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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7 Fun Facts About the Merritt Parkway

In July 1934, a Connecticut congressman named Schuyler Merritt presided over the groundbreaking ceremony for the Merritt Parkway. The road would be “constructed for pleasant transit,” he said.

Tell that to the motorists who navigate the tight curves, narrow lanes, short ramps, dangerous entrances and low bridges that pinch cars together at an average speed of 73 mph—at least during non-rush hours.

Designed for Chrysler Airflows, Buick Roadsters and Cadillac All-Weather Phaetons, the Merritt Parkway originally had speed limits averaging 40-mph. The road stretched from the New York state line to the Housatonic River in Stratford. As a pleasant and quick way to travel from New York to the countryside, it spurred the development of Fairfield County’s tony suburbs.

“Driving into Connecticut on the Merritt Parkway gives drivers a fleeting glimpse of Fairfield County 60 years ago, when back-country Greenwich was still a hodgepodge of cow pastures and 20-acre estates,” reported the New York Times on Jan. 30, 2020. The story appeared after an accident on Dead Man’s Curve killed two Greenwich high school students.

“It is also a highway that thousands of commuters use to get to their jobs in New York, and although it is a beautiful road, the nearly eight-mile stretch of highway here can be dangerous,” reported the newspaper.

In the Merritt’s most recent history, preservationists and transportation officials have tried to balance scenic beauty and historic integrity with highway safety and efficiency. After all, those flowering trees are nice until someone dies crashing into them.

The Connecticut Department of Transportation can only do so much. The Merritt Parkway is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 37.5-mile road is Connecticut’s largest—and most heavily visited—National Register historic district.

Steel flowers on a bridge in Stratford are one reason the Merritt is on the National Register

Merritt Parkway

It’s hard to believe today, but aesthetic ideals once inspired highway construction.

The Merritt resulted in part from the City Beautiful movement during the first half of the 20th century. City Beautiful advocates believed parkways linking parks outside of cities would alleviate urban problems like crime and delinquency.

The Merritt was actually the last of the New York area parkways. Urban planner Robert Moses had created a system of parks and parkways in New York City as well as Long Island. And right across the Connecticut border, Westchester County in 1906 began building parkways – the Saw Mill River, the Hutchinson River, the Briarcliff-Peekskill, and Cross County Parkways. In Washington, D.C., the George Washington Memorial Parkway opened in 1932. (Note: the urban problems didn’t go away.)

An abutment with sculpture on the Grumman Avenue Bridge in Norwalk

By then, the National Park Service had come up with a formal definition of a parkway. A parkway had to

Only allow recreational, noncommercial traffic;
Prohibit unsightly roadside development and signs;
Include wide rights-of-way to buffer abutting property;
Encourage preservation of natural scenery by granting no frontage or access rights;
Prefer a new site to avoid congested and built-up areas;
Give best access to native scenery
Eliminate major grade crossings; and
Reduce traffic congestion with well-distanced entrances and exits. (On the Merritt, No Man’s Land runs 5.5 miles between exit 42 in Westportand exit 44 in Fairfield.

The Merritt qualified.

The Quintessential Parkway

The Merritt was one of the last of the parkways. It “culminated a generation of experiments in combining the talents of engineers, landscape architects and architects to create parkways that served recreational purposes and gave aesthetic pleasure while providing safe transportation,” according to the nomination for the National Register. “In it, all the best features developed in its predecessors were put together to create the quintessential parkway.”

But World War II came along, and the German autobahn became the model for high speed travel over highways.

Renovating the Merritt Parkway

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, two new interchanges went up over the Merritt Parkway in Trumbull. They endangered the road’s historic nature and agitated preservationists, who then in 1991 managed to get the parkway listed on the National Register.

The Redding Road Bridge on the Merritt Parkway

In 1992, the state Department of Transportation created a working group to come up with guidelines for maintaining and rehabilitating the parkway. Around 2000, the Merritt Parkway Conservancy began as a specialized SWAT team to make sure CTDOT complied with those guidelines. The Conservancy, for example, inspects every tree before it is cut down or moved.

CTDOT has since worked to rehabilitate all 37.5 miles of the parkway. It has repaved the roadway, removed invasive species and installed wood guardrails reinforced with steel. It has cut down trees and removed ledge, recolored concrete bridges for historical accuracy and rehabilitated the Colonial Revival service stations. The state also began to allow fast-food vendors in the rest areas for the first time.

Here are some more fun facts about the Merritt Parkway.

1.It was originally called the Parallel Post Road.

The Merritt didn’t start off as a parkway, but as a solution to traffic congestion. The old Boston Post Road, the only shoreline artery linking New Haven with New York City, had gotten crowded and dangerous. In 1925, Gov. John H. Trumbull said he’d support a plan to build an alternate road.

Schuyler Merritt, the Republican congressman from Fairfield County, headed a commission to get the parkway built. For that, county Republicans urged the state to name the parkway after him.

2. A corrupt political hack bought the land for the parkway. He went to prison.

Leroy Kemp belonged to the Fairfield County Republican machine, and when it came time to buy rights-of-way for the Merritt, he got the job. Kemp, a Darien real estate broker, had served as a state representative and had a lot of friends in the state GOP.

Kemp ultimately inflated the cost of land purchases to $6.5 million, a whopping amount of money back then.

He took advantage of the secretive highway commissioner, John MacDonald, who refused to disclose plans for the parkway.

A Colonial Revival service station in Fairfield

Since no one knew where the road would go, Kemp told his real estate broker friends what parcels the highway department needed. They would then approach the landowners and offer to negotiate with the state. When the seller agreed to sell for a price, two, five and ten times the market value, the real estate agents would then split their fees with Kemp. In one deal, for example, Kemp had the state buy a piece of land in Greenwich for $93,000. Fair market value was $7,458.

Eventually people got suspicious. The state and the press investigated, and ultimately Kemp was sentenced to three to seven years in the penitentiary. A jury found him guilty of conspiracy after three hours of deliberation.

A grand jury found Connecticut Highway Commissioner “entirely to blame” for most of the “waste, extravagance and incompetence” in buying the parkway’s rights of way. MacDonald resigned in disgrace after 15 years on the job.

Ornamental detail on the Lake Avenue Bridge

3. Nude swimmers and picnickers caused problems in the early years.

When the Merritt Parkway opened, people started taking picnic lunches and relaxing by the side of the road.

Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, complained to CTDOT about skinny dippers in a creek that passed under the Merritt and over his property.

4. Tollbooths caused a stir. Now they’re museum pieces.

Many people objected to the state’s announcement that it would collect 10-cent tolls in Greenwich and Milford (near the parkway’s entrance). People felt the government taxed them twice since taxes, not tolls, paid for the parkway’s construction.

Merritt Parkway toll booth at the Boothe Memorial Park

The highway architect, George Dunkelberger designed rustic, whimsical Log Cabin-style tollbooths. An out-of-work electrical engineer named Theodore Fleischmann paid the first toll at the Greenwich toll booth without complaint. But others protested by paying in pennies or throwing trash near the toll booths. One man drove fast through the tollbooth, then threw his dime in the grass.

When Connecticut eliminated tolls in 1988, the Milford toll booth went to Boothe Memorial Park in Stratford. Part of the Greenwich toll plaza went to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

5. The original 69 mostly-much-admired bridges are all different.

An urban legend about the bridges says different people made proposals to the highway department. Since government officials couldn’t make up their minds, they selected them all. But it’s wrong. A single architect, George Dunkelberger, came up with the idea of building attractive, unique bridges.

The James Farm Road overpass with Nike wings

He designed most of them in the then-popular Art Deco or Art Moderne style. Some of the notable work includes relief sculptures of a Puritan and an Indian on the Comstock Hill overpass in Norwalk. Dunkelberger elaborately ornamented the Lake Avenue Bridge. He put concrete Nike (the goddess not the shoe) wings on the James Farm Road overpass.

For some bridges, Dunkelberger took inspiration from fortified French bridges of the Gothic and Renaissance eras. On the Route 110 bridge in Stratford he applied metal flowers.

The Comstock Hill overpass in Norwalk

Works Progress Administration workers built some of the bridges.

One exception is at exit 39, which has ordinary modern bridges constructed using undecorated concrete-on-steel I-beams. The highway department got a grant to build the bridge, but it didn’t cover the cost of decoration.

The Comstock Hill overpass in Norwalk.

6. It took 200 gardeners to landscape the Merritt Parkway.

A roadside development team of 200 men planted and shaped the parkway’s s surroundings. They removed mature trees from the path of the road and stored them for later replanting, and they scraped topsoil to use along the roadside. Earl Wood, engineer of roadside development, later recalled, “The general objective was to help nature heal the scars of construction.”

Weld Thayer Chase, a 27-year-old landscape architect, supervised the landscaping. Wanting a splendid spring bloom, he contracted for 47,700 laurels and 3,777 dogwoods, He also bought 6,459 pines, 3,095 cedars and 2,037 hemlocks. In addition, Fairfield County garden clubs helped with the landscaping, donating thousands more flowering trees and shrubs. The parkway once had 17 bronze plaques embedded in rocks to commemorate the garden clubs’ efforts.

Chase also planted Oriental bittersweet, which has since overgrown the parkway. (Well, he was only 27.)

7. Commercial vehicles are still not allowed on the Merritt Parkway.

Technically, the Merritt Parkway doesn’t allow trucks, RV’s, cars towing trailers, buses and all commercial vehicles. However, commercial vehicles do flout the law, and trucks have gotten stuck under the 11-foot-high bridges.

The state police say they have higher priorities than keeping pick-up trucks off the Merritt.

The Nichols-Shelton Road Bridge

All black and white photos courtesy Library of Congress.

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The Mark Twain House: Part Steamboat, Part Medieval Fortress, Part Cuckoo Clock

Building the Mark Twain House was not an easy task for Samuel Clemens and his wife, Olivia. But when they moved into the quirky mansion with their children in 1874, they began the happiest years of their lives.

Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, in 1871

Clemens had fallen in love with Hartford and with his wife. Of Hartford, he said, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief… You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”

In 1873, he tried to beautify the city further by building a grand home for his family. One critic called the final product “part Mississippi steamboat, part medieval fortress, part cuckoo clock.” The family lived in it for 17 years, the happiest of his life. It was in that house that he wrote his most memorable works.

Genesis of the Mark Twain House

It all started in 1867 when Clemens, 31, took a five-month voyage to Europe and the Holy Land to write travel articles. He was then known as a journalist rather than a novelist. During the journey, he made friends with Charles Langdon.

Olivia Langdon Clemens at about 24

While visiting Langdon in his stateroom, Twain caught a glimpse of an ivory miniature of his older sister, Olivia. It was love at first sight. When they returned to America, he had dinner with the Langdon family in New York City, where they were staying for the Christmas holidays. On New Year’s Day Clemens called on Olivia and prolonged his visit beyond the socially acceptable 15 minutes – by 11 hours, 45 minutes.

Charles then invited him to visit with his family at their mansion in Elmira, N.Y., for a week. When he finally made it to Elmira in August, he stayed three weeks.

Clemens knew Olivia Langdon was much too good for him. She had wealth (coal money), education and social standing. He didn’t.

Her family liked him, but he wasn’t quite what they had in mind for their shy and gentle daughter. The devout Langdons didn’t touch alcohol. Clemens admitted he was “drunk oftener than was necessary & that I was wild & Godless, idle, lecherous & a discontented & unsettled rover.

He capitalized on his travel articles by turning to the lecture circuit, frequently finding excuses to visit Elmira. His fame as Mark Twain grew as his audiences swelled.

All the while he wrote Olivia – 180 letters, in fact. She sent him the sermons of Henry Ward Beecher. The tone of his letters grew meeker and more submissive. Finally, no doubt aware of his growing success, the Langdon family gave their approval to his marriage in 1870. Not only that, his father-in-law bought them a mansion with servants – in Buffalo.

Moving Out of Elmira

The newlyweds worked together on the manuscript of Innocents Abroad, a compilation of his travel articles. It was a monster hit, allowing him to quit his job as a Buffalo Express reporter. While visiting his publisher in Hartford, Clemens decided in 1873 he needed to move there. A dozen publishers operated out of the city, which attracted such prominent writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

The Mark Twain House in Hartford

The Clemenses commissioned Edward Tuckerman Potter to design the three-story brick mansion in the Nook Farm neighborhood, essentially a writer’s colony. The property included a two-story carriage house and greenhouse. Twain wrote to his mother-in-law about his frustration with the building process:

I have been bullyragged all day by the builder, by his foreman, by the architect, by the tapestry devil who is to upholster the furniture, by the idiot who is putting down the carpets, by the scoundrel who is setting up the billiard-table (and has left the balls in New York), by the wildcat who is sodding the ground and finishing the driveway (after the sun went down), by a book agent, whose body is in the back yard and the coroner notified. Just think of this thing going on the whole day long, and I am a man who loathes details with all my heart.

The House

Nevertheless, great attention to detail went into the opulent, 11,500-square-foot house. It had high ceilings and massive amounts of carved wood. Clemens insisted on a window over the fireplace so he could see snowflakes meet the flames. He added a patch of tin to the roof so he could hear the rain drumming on it. Around the house he had rambling porches built like riverboat decks. And he had a massive carved mantle brought over from a Scottish castle installed in the library.

The house had modern conveniences available only to the upper crust: a bell system, central heating, lots of indoor plumbing, a burglar alarm, a shower and a telephone, hidden away in a telephone booth in the entryway.

Floor plan of the Mark Twain House. Courtesy Library of Congress.

No one seems to know quite what to call it: “Continental Picturesque,” “High Gothic” or just “Mississippi Steamboat.” Today the Mark Twain House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as “an asymmetrical polychromatic brick structures, with sweeping wood cornices and gables and flamboyant patterns of black and vermilion brick.”

The Good Life

The Clemenses moved into the house in September 1874 with their two daughters, Susy, a toddler, and Clara, an infant. Jean would follow in 1880.

The 17 years the family spent in the house were the happiest of Sam Clemens’ life. “”To us, our house was not unsentient matter — it had a heart, and a soul … It was of us, and we were in its confidence,” he wrote.

The window above the fireplace

The Godless, idle, lecherous rover turned into a devoted family man. Olivia home-schooled the children in the classroom, later hiring a governesses. Their father played with them in the conservatory and told them bedtime stories at night.

The family led a busy social life with the neighborhood influentials, hosting dinner parties, teas, charades and stag billiard nights. Guests included included the actor Edwin Booth, author Thomas Bailey Aldrich, political cartoonist Thomas Nast, explorer Sir Henry Morton Stanley, Gen. William T. Sherman and writer Rudyard Kipling.

Where Tom Sawyer was born.

Harriet Beecher Stowe lived next door and often came over to play the piano.

The lavish living cost Clemens almost as much as he earned.

He earned quite a lot during his time in the Mark Twain House. He wrote his most notable fiction in his billiard room. Clemens sat at a desk facing the wall so the billiard table and the outdoors wouldn’t distract him. It worked; he wrote Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper and Life on the Mississippi.

That fireplace from Scotland

In 1881, the Clemenses hired Louis Comfort Tiffany to redecorate the mansion’s public rooms. Tiffany stenciled the elaborate entryway and painted patterns on the walls and ceiling in red, black and silver. His firm decorated the walls and ceilings with wallpaper and stencils. The result: “A circuit of the ground floor went from the Moorish front hall to a pink and silver drawing room evoking India to an Asian dining room and ended in a green and gold Persian library,” according to the Mark Twain House website.

Leaving the Mark Twain House

Clemens was as bad a businessman as he was good as a writer. He made some bad investments and in 1891 moved to Europe where the cost of living was cheaper. He lost more money in 1893 and went on the lecture circuit to earn it back. “The lack of money is the root of all evil,” he wrote.

Daughter Susy died suddenly of spinal meningitis in 1896, and the Clemenses couldn’t bear to return to the house. Olivia never set foot in it again. But they hung on to it until 1903, when he sold it for one-sixth the amount he’d put into it. It then became a library, an apartment house and a school. Finally the house was going to be torn down, but preservationists saved it in 1929.

The Mark Twain House is now a museum open to visitors. It has the only Louis Comfort Tiffany rooms outside of New York City.

If you go to the Mark Twain House:

The only way to see the house inside is to go on a guided tour. Visitors are advised to buy tickets in advance. A trip led by a re-enactor costs a few extra dollars and generally gets good reviews. There is also a modern, handicap-accessible museum wing which has a 23-minute film on Twain running continuously, a couple of exhibit spaces, a gift shop, a cafe and two parking lots.

351 Farmington Ave., Hartford.

Images: The Mark Twain House in Hartford by Ken Zirkel via Flickr, CC By-SA 3.0. Scottish fireplace By EGryk – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72993335

All other images courtesy Library of Congress.

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Orchard House, Birthplace of Little Women

Louisa May Alcott nicknamed her dilapidated family home in Concord, Mass., “Apple Slump,” after a fruit dessert with dough that slumps onto the plate. But the house was – and still is – known as “Orchard House.”

She probably called the house Apple Slump because it sagged so badly. Or maybe because of the old apple orchard on the property.

Watercolor of Orchard House by May Alcott

Louisa wrote Little Women on a small white desk her father built for her in her bedroom. She didn’t really want to write it, but her publisher insisted. So she took her surroundings – the large, light-filled rooms, her sister’s piano, the shabby furniture – and put them in a book.

Orchard House still stands as an homage to Louisa May Alcott. Most of the furnishings and artifacts transport visitors to a time when a poor, hardworking idealist made it rich.

Orchard House

The house is a 2-1/2 story farmhouse, probably built around 1650. Eighty percent of the furnishings belonged to the Alcott family. The parlor still looks as it did when Anna (Meg) got married in it. Abba (Marmee) sewed the quilts in the bedrooms and served meals on the china in the dining rooms. May (Amy) created much of the art, including pencil sketches on her bedroom wall.

Orchard House today

Close by the house sits a plain, churchlike structure where her father taught his Concord Summer School of Philosophy and Literature.

Bronson Alcott, Louisa’s idealistic but improvident father, bought the land partly because it had 40 apple trees on it. He considered the apple a perfect food. Louisa and her three sisters were brought up as vegetarians because it was moral, healthy and kind to animals.

Bronson got the house for free. It was considered fit only for firewood and thrown into the deal for the orchard.

No More Moving

The Alcotts had moved 23 times when Bronson bought Orchard House. They couldn’t move in right away, though, because of its condition. Instead, they rented Nathaniel Hawthorne’s house while he served as President Franklin Pierce’s consul in Liverpool, England. Alcott’s younger sister, Elizabeth, died of scarlet fever in the rented house. She was 22, not 16 as Louisa wrote her into Little Women, but she did catch scarlet fever after holding a poor baby with the disease.

Bronson Alcott in his study

Bronson spent a year fixing up the house, but he didn’t paint it. He believed buildings should blend in with their environment, so he allowed Orchard House to weather.

He built Louisa a shelf desk in her bedroom. He repaired the back staircase, which the real March women descended to act in their plays. He moved the smaller tenant’s house and attached it to the back of Orchard House for his study. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson used to visit him in it. The books now in the study had belonged to him.

A rectangular pillow on the sofa belonged to Louisa May. She called it her mood pillow. if she was in a good mood, it was vertical. If she was in a bad mood, it was horizontal, and her family avoided her.

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa had a reason for her sour moods. As a Civil War nurse, she contracted typhoid fever, and doctors treated her with mercury. She lived with the effects of mercury poisoning her whole life. Nevertheless, she worked hard to earn money by writing, teaching and sewing in order to support her family. Her mother, really called Marmee, helped out too. Bronson viewed spiritual growth and self-denial as essential. Supporting his family, not so much.

The Sale of Orchard House

After 10 years of toil at her shelf desk, Louisa struck gold with Little Women in 1868. She and her family, though, continued to live in Orchard House. Despite her new wealth, the Alcotts didn’t buy new furniture, and Orchard House kept its shabby chic décor.

Anna (Meg) had been widowed, and in 1877 Louisa bought her Henry David Thoreau’s house. In November of that year Marmee died, so Louisa and Bronson moved in with Anna. May then lived in Paris.

The School of Philosophy

Orchard House stood empty for a few years. “It is forlorn standing empty,” wrote Louisa. “I never go by without looking up at Marmee’s window, where the dear face used to be, and May’s, with the picturesque vines around it.”

Then in 1882, the Alcotts sold the house to a family friend. People lived in it as a home until 1911 when the Concord Woman’s Club bought it as a memorial to Louisa May Alcott. It’s open to visitors every day of the year but January 1-3, Easter, Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve. Click here for information.

Louisa May Alcott wrote down the recipe below for apple slump.

Louisa May Alcott's Apple Slump

Nutrition facts: 200 calories 20 grams fat

Rating: 4.3/5

( 3 voted )

Ingredients

6 apples
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 cup water
1-1/2 cups flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
1-1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 cup milk

Instructions

Pare, core and slice 6 apples and combine with 1 cup of sugar, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and 1/2 cup water in a saucepan. Cover and beat to boiling point.

Meanwhile sift together 1-1/2 cups flour, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 1-1/2 teaspoon baking powder. Add 1/2 cup milk to make a soft dough.

Drop pieces of the dough from a Tablespoon onto the apple mixture, cover and cook over low heat for 30 minutes. Serve with cream.

You can also find Louisa’s recipe and more in the newly revised book, 29 Historic New England Apple Recipes. Now available in paperback and as an ebook through Amazon. Click here to order.

Images:

Orchard House: By User:victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27754775. Hillside Chapel By User:Jaydec – I created this work entirely by myself., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23682270.

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7 Fun Facts About the Newport Jazz Festival.

The Newport Jazz Festival launched dozens of brilliant musical careers, brought modern music festivals to America and produced countless recordings on film, vinyl and in cyberspace.

Duke Ellington famously revived his career at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1956. Miles Davis’ performance of “Round Midnight” got him a recording contract with Columbia Records. Verve Records released 12 –yes, 12 — albums from the 1957 festival alone.

It all began in 1954, when a wealthy couple met a jazz impresario and agreed to underwrite an open-air, two-day show. Producer George Wein brought Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Gene Krupa, George Shearing and Billie Holiday to the Newport Casino. Thirteen thousand people came. Five years later, Wein got Pete Seeger to help him organize the Newport Folk Festival.

Louis Armstrong with Willis Conover at the Newport Jazz Festival in 1958.

That first Newport Jazz Festival established the template for the next 70 years – not just for Newport, but for most major jazz festivals. Wein presented star attractions to sell tickets. But, as Wein explained, “it was the important unsung jazz heroes from the traditional to avant-garde that attracted the critics and gave the festival an artistic credibility.”

In 2023, the Newport Jazz Festival followed that model, with such headliners as Diana Krall, Herbie Hancock and Branford Marsalis. But old heroes like 84-year-old saxophonist Charles McPherson, described as “an icon of hard bop,” were there, as was newcomer Endea Owens, a bass player whose debut album hadn’t been released yet.

Here are some more fun facts about the Newport Jazz Festival.

1. The Newport Jazz Festival began as the most ambitious jazz festival ever.

A group of jazz fans who called themselves the Hot Club de France had sponsored jazz fairs in Nice and Paris in 1949, 1952 and 1954, so the concept wasn’t new. George Wein took it to a new level in Newport.

NEWPORT, RI – AUGUST 1: Newport Jazz Festival founder and Newport Folk Festival co-founder George Wein, behind the Fort Stage at the Newport Jazz Festival. Shot on Friday, August 1, 2014.

Before Newport, Wein had run Storyville, a Boston nightclub that featured jazz. Newport allowed him to go big.

“…there had been nothing as ambitious as the festival Mr. Wein staged that July on the grounds of the Newport Casino, an athletic complex near the historic mansions of Bellevue Avenue,” the New York Times reported in Wein’s obituary in September 2021.

Other festivals followed Wein’s lead: the Monterey Jazz Festival in California began in 1958, and the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland began in 1967. However, noted the Times, “for half a century, if there was a significant jazz festival anywhere in the world, there was a better than even chance it was a George Wein production.”

2. Fifteen minutes brought Duke Ellington fame.

In 1956, Ellington’s career was on the downward side of the curve when he and his orchestra appeared at Newport. They played ““Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue,” for 15 minutes. Saxophonist Paul Gonsalves stirred the crowd into a frenzy with 27 choruses. A wealthy socialite named Elaine Anderson stood up and began dancing provocatively, which inspired the audience to dance in the aisles and rush at the stage. Ellington had been around for a while and knew how to calm the crowd with a slower song.

Ellington released a recording of the concert, “Ellington at Newport,” his biggest hit.

Later, when a reporter asked him his age, he replied, “I was born in 1956 at the Newport Festival.”

3. The first Newport Jazz Festival made $142.50.

An estimated 13,000 people came to the two-day festival on July 17-18, 1954, but it barely broke even. Wein said it made as much as it did because he waived his $5,000 producer’s fee. Tickets cost $3. A rare ticket stub from that festival in 2023 was offered on eBay for $1,299.

4. The film High Society was partly based on Newport Jazz Festival founder Elaine Lorillard.

Elaine Guthrie married tobacco heir Louis Lorillard during World War II. Both loved jazz, and frequented Storytown, Wein’s Boston jazz club. They met Wein and offered to underwrite an outdoor jazz festival in Newport, R.I.

They gave Wein a grant of $20,000. The Lorillards sponsored the festival until 1961. Their Newport neighbor, Doris Duke, also supported the festival. (Her foundation still does.)

Duke Ellington with Elaine Lorillard

The Lorillards had a family friend, Cleveland Amory, who rewrote the screenplay The Philadelphia Story to include elements of Elaine’s life. Renamed High Society, it starred Grace Kelley, ostensibly chosen for her resemblance to Elaine. The Lorillard’s home, Quatrel, appeared in the film, as did the Lorillard’s daughter sitting on a piano stool with Louis Armstrong.

5. Bill Clinton played the saxophone for the Jazz Festival’s 40th Anniversary.

He didn’t go to Newport, though. He played with some jazz greats in June 1993 on the South Lawn of the White House. (Clinton was president then.) Herbie Hancock, Grover Washington Jr., Wynton Marsalis, Joe Williams and a dozen others performed an outdoor concert before 500 invited guests. A sweaty Clinton joined them with his saxophone for a jam session.

6. Both festivals moved around – a lot.

The jazz festival started outside the Newport Casino, an athletic complex, in 1954.

Newport Casino

When the neighbors complained about the crowds, the Lorillards bought a mansion, Belcourt, hoping to hold the festival there. The neighbors wouldn’t have it. So the festival moved to Freebody Park in 1955. Then a riot in 1960 forced its cancellation in 1961. From 1962 to 1964 it continued at Freebody Park, but that proved unsatisfactory so it moved again to an open field named Festival Field. For the next eight years it continued there, but then in 1971 more than 10,000 fans crashed the gate as Dionne Warwick sang “What the World Needs Now is Love.”

Belcourt Castle, Ledge Road side (west façade) Newport, Rhode Island

The festival then moved to New York City in 1972, expanding it to Saratoga in 1977 and Madarao, Japan, from 1982 to 2004. Wein returned to Newport in 1981, where for the next 22 years the festival took place at Fort Adams State Park. The COVID pandemic caused another hiatus in 2020, but the festival returned in 2021.

Spectators at Fort Adams Park, 2013

The folk festival also moved around. It started at Freebody Park in 1959, five years after the first jazz festival. Wein canceled it in 1970 for the next 15 years. His producer, Bob Jones, persuaded him to bring it back. With the exception of the 2020 COVID hiatus, the folk festival has gone on ever since.

7. One of the greatest documentaries in history was filmed at the Newport Jazz Festival.

Bert Stern, who photographed Marilyn Monroe, and film editor Aram Avakian filmed highlights of the 1958 concert and released it as the documentary Jazz on a Summer’s Day the next year. It featured Louis Armstrong playing a duet with Jack Teagarden on “Rocking Chair.” Anita O’Day, in an enormous hat and white gloves, sang “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

Anita O’Day at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival

Dinah Washington played the xylophone and sang “All of Me.” It ended with Mahalia Jackson singing the Lord’s Prayer.

The film also showed the water, the town, the crowds and the musicians at leisure.

Jazz on a Summer’s Day featured crowd shots as well as the performers.

Armstrong appeared on film saying, “I was at a little Italian trumpet player’s house, and his mother was a Countess, well they was makin’ that spaghetti and we was wailin’, you know. In this big ol’ dinin’ room they had this table and up in the ceilin’ they had Mark Anthony and Cleo and all the cats that they painted. Lookin’ down on you as if to say, “Man, you shore can eat”?”

The US Library of Congress selected the film for preservation at the United States National Film Registry as “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”.

Images: Ellington at Newport By May be found at the following website: http://static.rateyourmusic.com/album_images/s11659.jpg Rate Your Music.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12235692. Jazz on a Summer’s Day By https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNWRjMTcyOGUtZjU5NC00Y2U5LTk4NWYtNjRkYTEyMTYzZTgyXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjI4MjA5MzA@._V1_SY1000_CR0,0,657,1000_AL_.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60720012. Louis Armstrong By Michael Williams – originally posted to Flickr as 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10108881. George Wein By digboston – George Wein, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110026155. Jimmy Driftwood Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24761685. Belcourt By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117808390. Anita O’Day by A Continuous Lean via Flickr, CC BY 2.0,. Audience at 1958 Newport Jazz Festival by A Continuous Lean via Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Spectators at Fort Adams Park 2013 by Vernaccia via Flickr , CC BY 2.0. Elaine Lorillard By Boston Globe [2], Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14670031.

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