From page 76
On a happier note, Sam and Livy's plans for their new house began to assume tangible form. Livy notified her husband in early December 1871, while he was still on his speaking tour, that she had “been drawing a plan of our house” to be built within their budget. “We will put if it is necessary the 29000 into house, grounds, and what new furniture we may need,” she wrote. But “if after a time we find that the estate is not worth a living to us, we will change entirely our mode of living—That probably will not be discovered for three or four or perhaps the eight years—we shall involve nobody and discomfort nobody, we will not be in debt for our house.” ‘They purchased a building lot near the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe for thirty-one thousand dollars from Hartford attorney Franklin Chamberlin on January 16, 1872. The lot was bounded on the north by Farmington Avenue, on the east by Forest Street, and on the west by Park River, formerly known as Hog River for the effluence dumped into it by the slaughterhouses along its shores. The stream no doubt reminded Sam of Bear Creek in the Hannibal of his boyhood. “Have just bought the loveliest building lot in Hartford,” Sam bragged in mid-January, with measurements of “544 feet front on the Avenue & 300 feet deep,” and "paid for it with first six months” of royalties on the sale of Roughing It. He reveled from the start in the prestige of his purchase. “Mr. Clemens seems to glory in his sense of possession,” Livy wrote her family, because “he goes daily onto the lot, has had several falls trying the lay of the land by sliding around on his feet.”
From Page 145-6:
The Clemenses left Elmira on September 10, spent a week shopping for carpeting and other home furnishings in New York, where they again registered at Hoffman House, and arrived in Hartford on September 19. Their house was finished save for interior detailing on the ground floor.