From page 16-7 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891:

After pausing a week at the St. Nicholas to allow Livy to rest, they at last reached their new home in Hartford on October 3.

The capital of Connecticut, with a population of about thirty-eight thousand, according to the 1870 census, Hartford was “becoming the pleasantest city, to the eye, that America can show,” Sam wrote Livy even before their marriage. “I never saw any place before where morality and huckleberries flourished as they do here,” he had observed during his first visit to the city in September 1868, The home of the Colt Arms factories and the Pratt & Whitney machine shops, with comvenient rail links to Boston and New York, Hartford was so prosperous that its citizens enjoyed the highest per capita income in the country. “I want to be in such a position that I can go to New York or Boston” by train in four hours or so “if I want to,” Sam explained. “I don’t want to go to either, but I like to have them nearby,” Years later he would reflect, “A good deal of experience of men enabled me to choose my residence wisely. I live in the freest corner of the country.” Hartford was also the headquarters of Sam's publisher, the American Publishing Company, several other subscription presses, and the Aetna Life Insurance Company, the Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Company, and other national insurers. The residents of the Nook Farm neighborhood included former U.S. senator Francis Gillette, John Hooker's brother-in-law; Gillette's son William, a future play wright and actor; the author Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband Calvin; Charles Dudley Warner, co-owner and coeditor of the Hartford Courant, and his wife Susan; Charles Dudley Warnet’s brother George and his wife Lilly, the daughter of Francis Gillette; retired Civil War general Joseph Hawley, the other co-owner of the Hartford Courant; Thomas Perkins and his wife Mary Beecher Perkins, the sister of Harriet Stowe and Isabella Hooker; and the lawyer Charles Enoch Perkins, the son of Thomas and Mary and nephew of Harriet and Isabella. Above all, Hartford was the hometown of Harmony and Joseph Twichell, minister of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church and Sam’ best friend for the next forty years. While Sam and Livy remained members, at least nominally, of the Park Church in Elmira, they rented a pew at Asylum Hill. “With his big heart, his wide sympathies, and his limitless benignities and charities and generosities,” Sam avowed, Twichell was “the kind of person that people of all ages and both sexes fly to for consolation and help in time of trouble.” He was “a good man, one of the best of men, although a clergyman,” and “my oldest friend—and dearest enemy on occasion."