When Twain was here, most every Summer from 1869 to 1890, and periodically thereafter, there were no woods. The study was, as he put it, “perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.” One can still approximate this view from the veranda of the main house at Quarry Farm, a hundred yards southeast and downhill from where the study stood. On a clear day, the blue hills are visible well across the Pennsylvania border, seven miles south.
It was this view, across the Chemung River Valley, this panorama of church steeples, lumber barges, railways bridges, and smokestacks, of commercial development buttressed by wilderness on all sides, which inspired Twain’s imaginative return to antebellum Missouri. First the early chapters of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and then the greater parts of Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were drafted here, along with dozens of other novels, memoirs, plays, essays, stories, speeches, and at least one pornographic farce solely for private circulation. Twain estimated that he wrote ten chapters in the study at Quarry Farm for every one he wrote elsewhere.
Visitors joke, often enough for it to become something of a cliché amongst our staff, that Twain’s productivity must have been fueled by boredom. His other regular haunts during the Gilded Age – Hartford, New York City, London, Vienna, Berlin – are so cosmopolitan and Elmira so provincial by comparison. It must have been easy for him to avoid distraction up there on East Hill. I have myself sometimes described him as looking down on Elmira like the Grinch over Whoville. But there is no evidence that Sam Clemens disdained or eluded the social scene of Elmira. To the contrary, some of his most cherished friendships were developed here, with Thomas K. Beecher, Charley Langdon, John T. Lewis, and John B. Stanchfield. And he did not vegetate at Quarry Farm, waiting for them to come to him, either.
One of Twain’s most healthful habits was his near-daily constitutionals. He was a “pedestrianist,” as he put it. Often accompanied by friends, often chain-smoking, he would walk shocking distances over tough terrain. During the seasons he spent here, downtown Elmira was connected to Quarry farm only by what one visiting reporter described as “a winding road, which is steep, very steep, and at times is really a dangerous driveway.” Twain was well aware of the danger, having witnessed the occasion in 1877 when a runaway carriage containing his sister-in-law and niece nearly careened into a deep ravine, saved only by the heroic efforts of Lewis.