“Time’s Arrow” (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.

Edward Guimont is Assistant Professor of World History at Bristol Community College in Fall River, Massachusetts. He received his PhD in history from the University of Connecticut (where he lived around the corner from Mark Twain’s Hartford house) and is co-author of the book When the Stars Are Right: H. P. Lovecraft and Astronomy (Hippocampus Press, 2023). His second book, The Power of the Flat Earth Idea: History from the Marginalised, is currently being written under contract with Palgrave Macmillan for publication through the Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology series. His interest is on the political ramifications of fringe science and pseudohistory, including cryptozoology, settler colonial invented histories, and the role of speculative fiction in the development of worldviews.

Professor Guimont has delivered two talks for CMTS. You can find them here:

• Edward Guimont, “The Cosmic Mark Twain” (July 24, 2024 – The Park Church)
• Edward Guimont, “Shadow of the Comet: Celestial Speculation in Twain’s Lifetime” (October 7, 2023 – Quarry Farm Barn)

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In 1869, what appeared to be the body of a petrified giant was unearthed on a farm in Cardiff, New York, approximately eighty miles northeast of Elmira. A full history of the Cardiff Giant would take far too long for this writeup, but suffice to say that it was quickly revealed to be a hoax, influenced by a wave of (dubious) reporting on such ‘discoveries’ out West—but not before P. T. Barnum had made his own copy, exhibiting his ‘genuine fake’ Giant to paying crowds in Manhattan.

The saga of dueling hoax antediluvian giants—and the fact that crowds paid to see each of them even with their provenance revealed—was unsurprisingly of interest to Mark Twain. He shortly wrote two stories about it, “The Capitoline Venus” and “A Ghost Story.” But in a seeming defiance of the trajectory of time worthy of Hank Morgan, Twain may have helped inspire the Cardiff Giant hoax—for, with his 1862 story “The Petrified Man,” Twain had his own contribution to the wave of fossilized giant fake news.

None of this was on my mind when, on 22 July 2024, I stopped to see the Cardiff Giant at its current resting place in Cooperstown, New York, on my way from my home in Fall River, Massachusetts to start my Quarry Farm Fellowship. I had known of the Cardiff Giant for years, and only after arriving at Quarry Farm, looking through the enormous number of reference books on the second floor, did I think to look up whether Twain might be aware of the miraculous discovery near his fiancée’s home several months before their wedding. Lo and behold, I found enough material to form the basis for a future publication.

I had come to Quarry Farm to do research on Twain’s interest in astronomy, particularly Halley’s Comet, famously appearing in time for both his 1835 birth and 1910 death. And I found plenty to add to my research pile on that topic, due to be written up for an upcoming volume of The Mark Twain Annual. But in a testament to not only the resources available at, but the inspirational capacity of, living at Quarry Farm for two weeks, I not only had a second Twain work, but a third—on the intellectual ties between Twain and politician-turned-conspiracy-theorist Ignatius Donnelly—came to mind from my readings there, waiting to be written into reality like Twain’s petrified giant. Even ignoring the archival sources, the research library on the second floor of Quarry Farm alone would have made the stay worthwhile, the equivalent of months of interlibrary loan requests at my fingertips.

My research at Quarry Farm benefitted from HVAC issues at Elmira College, which meant that the various archival material I was interested in looking through were brought directly to Quarry Farm by the very kind and helpful Gannett-Tripp Librarian Katy Galvin, where the materials would be available to me 24/7. I can honestly say, I have never had such service in any of the many archives I’ve been to in the past! And while there’s a certain academic comfort in visiting the archives in person, having the materials on hand meant that I was free to take them onto the porch and read them, saved from the late July heat wave by the awning and breeze, while being distracted by the amazing view of the Chemung River and Pennsylvania beyond. I spent many mornings there drinking coffee (while dunking chocolate-covered cookies from Wegmans, perhaps the greatest culinary discovery of the trip) and looking out on the green and blue, aware that the vista before me was likely not enormously different than that which Twain might have enjoyed on his own summer visits. And at night, the scattered lights of Elmira and Southport were a pleasant mirror to the stars overhead, far from the overwhelming night lights of the city.

Unfortunately, I did not see any UFOs overhead, despite this region of New York being known to would-be Mulders as a hotspot, and Twain himself living through two waves of mass sightings of what at the time were called “mystery airships” (those of 1896-97 and 1909-10). I did, however, encounter a very much identified flying object inside the house: a bat, who flew by one evening while I was working in the library, looking through Susan Crane’s various astronomy books. With the Victorian setting, he added to the Gothic atmosphere.

More personable than my bat roommate were my itinerant friends Greg the cat and Weezy the dog, who helped make up for me leaving my own cat and dog at home (I did see Greg’s older feline comrade Dr. Carmichael, but only once on the second to last day). Frank Piper, the temporary groundskeeper during my stay, did excellent work making sure everything was running smoothly, and very kindly gifted me some excellent grilled chicken on my final evening. Beyond the Wegmans chocolate chip cookies, Vincenzo’s Pizza downtown—on the site of the former Langdon Mansion—became a local favorite for a quick bite, and in the evenings I took the opportunity to look over my various notes for the day at as many regional breweries as possible. But I always made sure to spend at least some of each evening on the porch.

I was born in Hartford, and while finishing up my PhD at the University of Connecticut, lived near Twain’s Hartford house. If you ask the people who work there, they will tell you that it’s haunted, and one of the signs is the smell of spectral tobacco in his beloved billiards room. I cannot speak to that, but I can say that I did not encounter any phantasms in my Quarry Farm stay—but as a testament to the power of smell in memory, the distinctive smell of the library, with its row after row of Victorian books, remains etched in my memory. If the porch with its captivating view may have been the star attraction of Quarry Farm, my favorite room proper was the library, like the reading room of some explorers’ club of yore. Sitting there, especially late at night with the low lights approximating candles or early electricity, I felt a kinship to the bookworms of the past—Cranes, Langdons, and Clemenses—who lovingly assembled and took advantage of that vast collection. If I could have a house with a room with half of that character to it, I would be a happy person. My wife, viewing the library during a Facetime tour, immediately logged it as an aspirational room for a future domicile.

Although my wife was unfortunately unable to join me, I was thankfully not alone for the full two weeks—much as I’m sure I could have passed the time between the library and the porch. On 24 July, I gave a lecture on my research at Park Church, as part of its Summer Lecture series. Even though I gave it on my third day of the residency, and had prepared the talk before leaving home, already I was able to make some additions based on my archival work and discoveries among the Crane bookshelves. A week later, on 31 July, I attended the following Park Church lecture, by Barbara Snedecor on the letters of Olivia Clemens and Susan Crane, which followed an afternoon book club on the famous porch, on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Despite not having read the book in likely twenty years, I was glad to be able to hold my own in the discussion—and to get even more ideas for where to take my writing from it.

In touring Twain’s Hartford house, with its Victorian design and cutting-edge technological innovations (and less successfully, the nearby Paige Compositor) I was always reminded of the works of another of my favorite childhood authors, Jules Verne. On arriving at Quarry Farm, I could easily picture the library at home on the Nautilus, or in the Baltimore Gun Club. It therefore hurt me to learn during my stay how Twain had a—still somewhat unclear—extreme dislike of the French science fiction master. However, to compensate, I did learn of his appreciation of several other authors of the genre: Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Garrett Serviss, Edward Bellamy, Camille Flammarion, and certainly not least, H. G. Wells (though there is no evidence Twain ever read The Time Machine).

As such, I hope Twain would be understanding of an indulgence I had to take while staying in the same house that he once did. Growing up, alongside Verne and Wells, I was of course a great fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation. In the show’s fifth season finale, the crew of the Enterprise travel back in time to 1893 San Francisco, where they encounter a certain Samuel Clemens himself. After Twain’s efforts to warn the San Franciscans about the time travelers is mistaken for his plans for a sequel to A Connecticut Yankee, Twain finds himself briefly taken into the twenty-fourth century, meeting various aliens aboard the starship Enterprise. Sitting in that fantastic library—directly across from both a portrait of Twain, and Susan Crane’s copy of Wells’ The Outline of History—I watched Mark Twain interact with android, Klingon, and Captain Picard.

In my research at Quarry Farm, I found that one of Twain’s earliest writings on astronomical matters was a letter to then-fiancée Olivia on 8 January 1870—only two months after the Cardiff Giant’s nearby unearthing—where he commented on the distances between stars and how, “if we made a tour through space ourselves,” they might view the images of loved ones long past on different worlds. Biographer Albert Bigelow Paine likewise wrote that near the end of his life, Twain liked to calculate how long it would take human souls to reach Heaven, assuming their speeds are limited by the laws of physics and that Heaven was located around the star Alpha Centauri. With that in mind, it somehow felt apt to watch (a version of) Twain get the chance to embark on an interstellar voyage from the house he stopped visiting after his wife’s death.