“Quarry Farm in May 2024: Cemeteries and Caste” (A Quarry Farm Testimonial)
EDITOR’S NOTE: We occasionally feature testimonials from recent Quarry Farm Fellows and Residents, which combine conversational illustrations of their research and writing process with personal reflections on their experiences as Twain scholars, teachers, and fellows. Applications for Quarry Farm Fellowships are due each Winter. Find more information HERE.
Susan Gillman is Distinguished Professor of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She teaches 19th-century US literature and World Literature and Cultural Studies, and works on national literatures and cultures from a hemispheric perspective. She is the author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (1989) and Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (2003), honored by the MLA. She has worked collaboratively on several essay collections, most recently with co-editor Christopher Castiglia on Neither the Time nor the Place: Today’s Nineteenth Century (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Her new book, American Mediterraneans (U. of Chicago Press, 2022) traces the strange career of the “American Mediterranean,” a scholarly metaphor and folk geographical concept used from 1799 to the present in multiple disciplines, genres and languages, as a point of departure for a transnational and translational study of the Americas.
You can watch Professor Gillman’s 2024 Spring Trouble Begins talk “Mark Twain’s Caste Studies in Following the Equator” HERE.
During my visit to Quarry Farm in late May 2024, where I gave one of the “Trouble Begins” lectures and enjoyed too few days in residence, I was lucky to overlap with my close friend from graduate school, Shirley Samuels, who had a residential fellowship for the same week. She was one of the several people whose presence really defined my experience in that halcyon historical place. There are the dead, the Clemens-Langdon families that once slept upstairs, sat on the iconic front porch, and did all the things that are memorialized in that house. Among the living with whom I interacted, I remember the audience of local Elmiraites at my talk who described the unobstructed view of the valley from the porch that the Clemenses would have had—present-day reminiscences of a past never actually lived. Their account of the trees–planted, logged, and then renewed–explained the historical conditions that produced today’s forested views from the porch and upstairs windows. From the Quarry Farm caretaker, Steve Webb, we learned so much about the planting outside around the house that he has both renewed and made anew. It’s really an ongoing restoration process, uncompleted and open-ended, much like the whole historical reconstruction project that defines the Elmira environs.
Here are the places we visited. Some have been mentioned in the testimonial by the University of Virginia scholar Steven Cushman, who asks the same questions we mulled over. Given twenty years of visits to this history saturated location, why did more of the local history not seep into Mark Twain’s own history saturated writing? Was it his ambivalence about his upbringing, son of a slaveholder in a slave society and veteran of a very brief service in the Confederate army, given his marriage into a prominent abolitionist family?
We began with Woodlawn National Cemetery, where almost 3000 Confederate soldiers are buried in their own dedicated “CSA” (Confederate States of America”) area, and then made the requisite visit to the family plot. The pens left at the base of the Mark Twain headstone and plinth reminded us of the stones, rather than flowers, that Jews leave on graves.
After that we visited the nearby John W. Jones Museum, home to the sexton of the cemetery, himself a fugitive slave, who charged $1 per burial and became known as Elmira’s wealthiest black man. We spoke with the curator, struck by the somewhat jarring combination of rough boards and elegant portraits of Jones in the dilapidated cabin, more accurately described as maintained than restored.
From the cemetery we headed to the church that was the center of the Langdon-Clemens religious observance, as well as providing a place, a well-appointed room like a gentleman’s club, for Mark Twain to play pool after the worship service. We enjoyed chatting with the current minister, a progressive in the tradition of Thomas K. Beecher—Twain’s sometime pool partner, half-brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the Park Church Congregationalist minister for many years, starting in 1854. He was the minister who married Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon in 1870.
We were happy to be able to stop in at the Chemung County Historical Society, which has more information on both the Langdon and Clemens families, including the detail, new to us, that a woman doctor who was part of the local water cure establishment, had delivered the three babies born in Elmira to Olivia Langdon Clemens.
We also stopped at the octagonal study on the Elmira College campus.
And, of course, we had a splendid time sitting on the Quarry Farm front porch, bringing the past into the present—and looking out toward the open-ended future.
