The Lost Mansion Where Mark Twain Got Married | Langdon Mansion

When Mark Twain was in his thirties, he was recently famous, and even more so, infamous for the words he wrote. So imagine the shock his future father-in-law had when the young author proposed to his daughter. This is the story of Samuel Clemens' in-laws and the mansion where he married their daughter. Hi everyone, Ken here, hit that subscribe button, and let's explore this house. In 1809, Jervis Langdon was born in the small town of Vernon, New York. There was no family fortune waiting, no gentleman's education to inherit. So at 18, Jervis went behind the counter of a local country store, and for the better part of the next decade, he bounced between jobs. It was in Enfield, near Ithaca, that he met and married Olivia Lewis, the daughter of a prominent Madison County abolitionist family in the summer of 1832. From Enfield, the young couple moved on to Millport, a hamlet in Chemung country, where Jervis formed a partnership with a man named Myron Collins and edged his way into the lumber trade. In 1845, Langdon packed up his growing household and moved to Elmira. The Chemung Canal, opened in 1833, met a tangle of rail lines that pushed north toward the Erie and south into the Pennsylvania coal fields, making the city the perfect intersection for coal. By 1860, his business had become J. Langdon & Company, and the following year, he joined the Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad, and the Pitson & Elmira Coal Company in forming the Anthracite Coal Association. A cartel that shipped Pennsylvania hard coal across the Great Lakes from Buffalo Harbor. All the while, as an interesting side note, he somehow found time to aid in the Underground Railroad, personally leading runaways to freedom in Canada. Anyway, by the middle of the 1860s, the shopkeeper-turned-coal king was ready for a house that announced who he had become. Langdon's strategy was acquisition and transformation, not new construction from the bare ground. In 1862, he bought a parcel on West Church Street from the widow of a prosperous Elmira businessman named Anson C. Eli. Then, in 1866, Langdon brought in builders to enlarge and transform the existing house into something on an entirely different scale. The result, finished in the following years, was a three-story brownstone Italiane palazzo that many still consider the grandest private residence ever built in Elmira. The main facade was dominated by a pedimented central pavilion that projected boldly forward from the body of the house, flanked by matching projecting bays on the sides. Across the front ran a formal piazza, its columns raised on pedestals and crowned by stone balustrade. Above it all rose a large square cupola, the belvedere that identifies virtually every serious Italianate villa of the period, from which the family could look clear across downtown Elmira to the bend of the Chimung River. The grounds held outbuildings typical of a major Victorian household, a carriage house, stables for the horses, a garden, all enclosed by a cast-iron fence. But perhaps the most magnificent of these was the greenhouse, where plants would be grown year-round, offering a retreat from Elmira's harsh winters. Let's head around front, ascend the porch, and begin making our way inside. The entrance hall established the ambition of the house at the front door. It ran wall-to-wall with patterned Wilton carpet, and a matching runner with sewn-on borders climbed the main staircase behind it. Everything about the hall, sober, broad, and finished with the same double-og molded door frames that reappeared throughout the renovation, was designed to tell a visitor exactly what kind of household they had just walked into. The drawing room was the grand formal space of the first floor, and it was fitted out by pottier and stymus in a stylish Louis XVI Revival manner. There were sofas, armchairs, a central table, a pyramid, a console table topped by a second The wedding of Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon was held here in 1870, although sources disagree on whether the vows were spoken in the drawing room or in the library across the hall. The library, by contrast, was decidedly not for show. It was the family room, informal and casual and lived-in, the place where the Langdons read and wrote, played and napped. The walls held two landscapes by the Elmira painter George W. Waters, an important Hudson River school figure. At one side stood the great slant-front Renaissance Revival desk of walnut that was Jervis' personal writing station, solid, grave, and the appropriate register for a gentleman's desk. In the center of the room, a library table served as the writing surface for the rest of the family. Mark Twain, who practically lived in Elmira in the summers of the 1870s and 1880s, knew this room intimately. The reception room directly across the hall from the drawing room was a smaller parlor meant for the elaborate Victorian ritual of the social call. When the Langdons entertained very large crowds, the folding doors between the reception room and the drawing room could be thrown open and the two spaces made into one. The dining room was reworked in 1874 in the aesthetic movement then sweeping through elite American interiors. It featured beadboard dato on the lower walls, double ogee-molded doors and window frames punctuated by square corner blocks decorated with round bosses, and a ceiling of beams and panels of beaded boards. Bolivia's private sitting room, sometimes called her boudoir, served as her personal sanctuary and administrative command center. A decade and a half of sustained pottier and stymist patronage eventually layered the mansion's rooms with pieces in Italian Renaissance, Spanish Baroque, Louis XV, and American colonial styles. By the turn of the 20th century, the house was less a single style statement than a stratified archive of nearly every major revival fashion of the American Gilded Age. Now no account of the Langdon mansion can skip the son-in-law who made it famous. In the summer of 1867, young Charles Langdon, dispatched by his father on a Mediterranean grand tour meant to ready him for the family business, sailed abroad the steamship Quaker City and fell into the company of a 31-year-old traveling correspondent who called himself Mark Twain. In his stateroom, Charles kept an ivory miniature of his older sister, and Clemens, as he recalled decades later in his autobiography, fell in love with the face in the portrait before he ever met the woman. He met Olivia in person that December at the St. Nicholas Hotel in New York, and the rest is history. Travis Langdon did not enjoy his daughter's marriage for long. By early 1870, even before the February wedding, he was visibly ill and passed away in August of that year. For seven decades, the mansion itself remained in the family. By the late 1930s, the grandchildren offered the mansion and its lot to the city of Elmira for its assessed value, just under $50,000, on the condition that the city converted into a Mark Twain museum. But in the tail end of the Great Depression, the city had no appetite for taking another downtown parcel off the tax rolls for a literary shrine to men who had never actually lived their full time, and they declined. In 1939, the family sold the property to a real estate developer. Before demolition, a public auction dispersed what remained of the contents. By 1940, a stripped shopping center, called without apparent irony Langdon Plaza, had risen on the site. To this day, not even a historical marker claims the corner where the wedding of Mark Twain took place. And with that, I'll turn it over to you. What did you like best about this mansion? Let me know down below in the comment section, and while you're there, make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an exciting episode of This House.