MYSTIC AQUARIUM
At Mystic Aquarium & Institute for Exploration, close encounters of the incredible kind happen every day! Whether you're touching a ray, feeling the splash of a beluga whale, going beak-to-nose with a penguin or exploring the deep sea with the world’s only exhibits on Dr. Robert Ballard’s fascinating expeditions, you'll be closer to ocean life than you ever thought possible!
MARK TWAIN HOUSE
In 1873, Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, purchased land at the western edge of the City of Hartford, in an area known as Nook Farm. He engaged the New York architect, Edward Tuckerman Potter, to design the house. Mrs. Clemens had sketched a layout showing the relationship of the various rooms to views over the then open countryside. The house was completed in 1874, and the Clemens family moved in during September of that year.
In 1881, following the success of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and several lecture tours, the kitchen wing was enlarged, and the major rooms completely redecorated by "Associated Artists," a distinguished firm of interior designers, which included Louis Comfort Tiffany, Lockwood de Forest, Candace Thurber Wheeler, and Samuel Colman.
To Twain, this home was far more than shelter. In 1896 he wrote:
To us, our house was not insentient matter -- it had a heart, and a soul, and eyes to see us with; and approvals, and solicitudes, and deep sympathies; it was of us, and we were in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up and speak out its eloquent welcome -- and we could not enter it unmoved.
