From Page 471 The Life of Mark Twain: The Early Years, 1835-1871:
After returning from his visit to Hartford, Sam Clemens checked into the fashionable Everett House on Union Square in New York City. He visited Moses Beach at both his home on Columbia Street in Brooklyn and his summer house near Poughkeepsie, New York, to choose some of the photographs William James had taken during the Quaker City voyage for reproduction in The Innocents Abroad (1869), but because there were “such a multitude of them” Sam finally suggested that Elisha Bliss’s art editors make the selections. He had other plans—particularly to make his long-delayed first trip late in August to the Langdon home in Elmira, New York, a handsome brownstone mansion situated on three acres of prime real estate near downtown. With a population of about sixteen thousand, about the same size as Honolulu, the city was a major transportation center, a crossroads much like Hannibal had been in the 1850s, and a hub for both passenger and freight lines with a canal link between the Susquehanna and Chemung Rivers and the Erie Canal. Before the Civil War, moreover, Elmira was an important stop on the Underground Railroad—the Langdon mansion was connected by a tunnel to Park Church across Main Street and used to conceal fugitive slaves en route to Canada and freedom—and hosted such prominent abolitionist lecturers as Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garison, and Wendell Phillips. During the war, a prisoner camp (Hellmira), the (im)moral equivalent of the rebel camp in Andersonville, South Carolina, had been located about a mile from town, where over twelve thousand captured rebel soldiers were incarcerated in squalid conditions and over three thousand of them died.' Sam traveled to Elmira ostensibly to honor the invitation to visit extended to him the previous December by the Langdon family. He rekindled his friendship with Charley and Jervis Langdon and was introduced to Charley's mother, his older sister Susan, and her husband Theodore Crane.
Page 475
Sam and Charley spent a few days in Cleveland, where they were the guests of honor at a reception hosted by Abel and Mary Fairbanks at their home on St. Clair Street in the tony Bratenahl neighborhood, Charley, the former Interrogation Point, was “a good traveling comrade,” Sam reported to Livy, ‘& if he has any unworthy traits in his nature the partiality born of old companionship has blinded me to them.” Though he was never particularly fond of Abel Fairbanks, he was impressed by Cleveland, “a stirring, enterprising young city of a hundred thousand inhabitants.” His introduction to the local gentry in the mansions of Elmira and Cleveland seems to have turned his head, Whereas he had referred with populist contempt to merchant “princes of shoddy” in one of his Alta California letters in the spring of 1867, he now admired the fashionable houses along so-called Millionaires’ Row on Euclid Avenue, “one of the finest streets in America.” The homes there cost “$100,000 to ‘come in.’ Therefore, none of your poor white trash can live in that street.”
Charley returned from Cleveland to Elmira, and Sam continued to St, Louis to visit his mother and sister for the first time since he left for the West in 1861..
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