Love and Debt: A True Story of Mary Ann Cord, John T. Lewis, and Mark Twain at Quarry Farm

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

In his octagonal study at Quarry Farm, reminiscent of a steamboat pilothouse overlooking the Chemung River and the town of Elmira, New York, Mark Twain wrote two of his most powerful works and the gem of a short story, A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Fleard It. These works have endured because they were skillfully written in the vernacular and masterfully yet covertly addressed our national problem of slavery and its legacy of discrimination.1 Scholars such as Shelley Fisher Fishkin have noted the important influence of African American voices in Mark Twain's writing and have observed that his race consciousness was elevated in Elmira. They attribute this mostly to his association with former abolitionists there, particularly Twain's father-in-law Jervis Langdon, but they also recognize some role of African Americans Mary Ann Cord and John T. Lewis at Quarry Farm.2 Cord, Lewis and many other members of Elmira's black community were migrants from slavery and its aftermath in the Upper South.3 New research into the lives of these African American southerners, particularly Cord and Lewis, allows a fresh perspective on Mark Twain's writing and social activism. Through friendship and love, Cord and Lewis were agents for a profound transformation in Twain's consciousness that enhanced his writing and taught him a subtle yet potent method of agitating for social justice. Twain acknowledged and paid his debt to Cord and Lewis in a variety of ways, but scholars and the general public have yet to fully recognize it.According to Mark Twain, he-Samuel Clemens-became friends with John T. Lewis around 1869, when Lewis worked for Jervis Langdon as a coachman.4 Clemens spent that summer with Jervis and Olivia Langdon as he courted their younger daughter Olivia Louise Livy Langdon. The couple married on February 2, 1870 in the Langdon home in Elmira. That same year, Jervis Langdon bought a farm on East Hill near Drs. Silas and Rachel Brooks who established the Elmira Water Cure health spa, and their friend Thomas K. Beecher, pastor of Park Church in Elmira. East Hill was a bucolic yet progressive little enclave.5Langdon hired John T. Lewis to manage the East Hill property he named Quarry Farm, so Lewis moved from Elmira to a small tenant house there with his wife Mary Stover. Much to the grief of Langdon's community and family, including his son-in-law Clemens who helped nurse him, Langdon died of stomach cancer on August 6, 1870. Langdon's elder adopted daughter Susan Crane inherited the East Hill property and rented part of it to Lewis to farm while also employing him on her portion. Crane and her husband Theodore Crane expanded and renovated the main house, so her extended family could spend summers there. Crane built an octagonal study in 1874 to give Samuel Clemens a place to write in peace-and to clear the air in the house of his incessant cigar smoke. Crane hired Mary Ann Cord to cook for her family and their many guests.6During summers at Quarry Farm, Clemens got to know Lewis and Cord quite well; his relationship with them helped him write more effectively in Southern vernacular and portraying black as well as white characters.7 Although both originally hailed from Maryland and shared much culturally, Lewis and Cord had some fundamental differences. Lewis was literate, even philosophical, and a member of the Church of the Brethren, a sect prevalent in Maryland but almost non-existent in central New York, where they were called Dunker Baptists or disparagingly, Dunkards. Though isolated from other adherents, Lewis avidly read the denomination's publications and wrote a letter to the editor attesting to the comfort they afforded him.8 Cord could not read and write but was particularly fluent in oral culture, and she was a devout Methodist.Lewis and Cord sometimes argued about theology in the Quarry Farm kitchen, something that piqued Twain's interest. Their disagreements degenerated now and then into personal insults, at times referencing Lewis's dark and Cord's lighter skin tones. …