What a delightful account! I enjoyed taking the trip with you. Also loved
looking through your photos, especially when I spotted the Sculpture of
Mark Twain surrounded by his characters. Where was it? I think it was
done by Walter Russell who I learned about because he did the bust the
Sacramento Union had in its lobby until it closed. THAT bust now resides
in a library at
UC Davis. Turns out Mr. Russell was a man of many parts who, had they met,
would probably have been one of Mark Twain's friends. Learning about
Russell was one of the side benefits of what I learned preparing for a talk
I gave a month or so ago about the beneficial consequences MT got from
being hired by the Sacramento Union to write travel letters from Hawaii.
THANKS
Arianne Laidlaw
in Sacramento
On Mon, Aug 26, 2013 at 6:07 AM, Terry Ballard <[log in to unmask]>wrote:
> On Thursday, we travelled from the south shore of Long Island to Danbury to
> attend a Dropkick Murphys concert at the Ives outdoor concert park. The
> next morning, I set an agenda to drop by the Stormfield area the next
> morning on our way south. I'm not always a fan of GPS, but as we had to
> change roads 8-10 times on our way down, I had to put up with it in this
> case. In less than a half hour, we were on a little barely paved road
> called "Mark Twain Lane." We were looking for the Lobster Pot, the cottage
> that Twain secured for his trusted (then disgraced) secretary Isabel Lyons.
> The Google map showed that it was just south of the main road, but it
> wasn't. After the road bends to the left, it ends rather abruptly. On the
> left, we did see the Lobster Pot. I walked out to check if the studio was
> entertaining visitors that day, but I got no response. I peeked in the
> glass door and was met by a portrait of Twain himself. Then I walked to the
> garden gate and took a peek (and a photo).
>
> On the way back to the car, I remember noticing a strange thing. There was
> no sound at all. Living on Long Island next to a parkway, that doesn't
> happen very often. I remember the same thing in Benson Arizona more than 40
> years ago, but it's pretty rare. At the point where the road ends, there is
> an ornate stone gate identified as the number 30. I correctly guessed that
> this is the only part of the Twain estate that did not burn down at one
> time or another. There was no sign signifying this as private property, but
> I still didn't have the nerve to cross that gate. We drove south where
> there were a couple of houses and then nothing. The house at the end had
> giant scultures all over the front and back lawns. My main goal to was to
> find the Stormfield area, and we'd done that, so we went back to the
> highway.
>
> Just as we got on highway 53 we saw the Mark Twain Library in Redding. We
> had to stop for that because my wife and sons are also librarians. There
> was a bench with a sculpture of Twain looming in the background. Twain
> helped found this library just before his death, and his presence is felt
> in every corner of the building. All of the walls are adorned with his
> quotes including, sadly, the apocryphal one about how much his father had
> learned by the time that he (Twain) had turned 21. Since Judge Clemens died
> when Sam was a little boy, that doesn't add up.
>
> Later I looked at the Google Map again and switched to the Satellite view.
> To my great surprise, the area we had visited showed up as forested
> wilderness. Had I just made a trip to the Twilight Zone? Around the corner
> the library was there, but the Lobster Pot and the nearby houses didn't
> exist in Google Land. I tried MapQuest and, sure enough, saw every place
> that we had visited, as well as the reconstructed Stormfield well past the
> #30 gate. There's a mystery here, and maybe somebody in this group has an
> answer, but I'll just let that one ride for now. Photos I took on this trip
> can be seen at http://www.flickr.com/photos/terryballard/
>
>
>
>
> --
>
>
> Terry Ballard
> Author and Leisure Studies Manager
> http://www.terryballard.org
> Author of the book "Google this"
> http://googlethis.com<http://googlethisforlibraries.com/>
>
> "My memory has a mind of its own."
>
--
Arianne Laidlaw A '58
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