The Most Beautiful Workshop in the World: How a Cigar Lover Acquired the Gazebo of His Dreams and Created Timeless Books There (14 photos + 1 video)

Imagine an octagonal wooden gazebo in a quiet, remote location on the campus of a New York college.





Inside, there's a creaky chair, an old table with an inkwell, and a fireplace reeking of centuries-old smoke.



Every morning, a mustachioed man in a white suit struts down the path, locks himself in this little cage, and students stare at him through the glass. It's certainly an interesting image, but it's misleading. This cozy little room was moved here in 1952, 42 years after Mark Twain's death. In his lifetime, it stood in a different location: on top of Quarry Farm, a cliff on the property of his sister-in-law, Susan Crane.





Twain wasn't just a writer, he was also an avid smoker of cheap cigars. His study was usually so thick with smoke that it was impossible to see him. The Twain family spent almost every summer with relatives. Susan Crane, a practical woman who valued fresh air, firmly rejected the smog of tobacco in the house. In 1874, she gave her son-in-law a refuge—an open-air study, styled like the wheelhouse of a steamship, about 3.5 meters in diameter.



Twain was delighted. He wrote to friends:

It's an octagonal thing with a peaked roof, each facet pierced by a huge window. It sits all alone on the crest of a hill, overlooking valleys, towns, and distant blue mountains. It's a cozy nest. And when storms rush through the valley, lightning strikes beyond the hills, and rain drums on the roof—imagine such luxury.



In the heat, he shed all unnecessary items, wrote in his underwear, pinning the papers to the table with bricks left over from the old quarry, and called his corner nothing less than "the most beautiful workshop you've ever seen." The only thing missing to complete his happiness was cats. So, special cat doors were installed in the floor of his office to keep his furry friends company.



It was here, overlooking the meandering Chemung River, that he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court," and "Life on the Mississippi."



Today, Mark Twain's office is a major literary landmark in the country and part of the Twain Studies Center at Elmira College. It's open to visitors, but with a caveat: the original atmosphere of Quarry Farm, a historic home in Elmira that belonged to the writer's sister-in-law, is closed to tourists and is used only for research residencies.



The study itself recently underwent a major restoration for its 150th anniversary. Of course, you can no longer see the bearded genius behind the glass; only his old desk, the stove, and the cat holes that remember the paws of Mark Twain's muses. But the writer himself doesn't need to be looked for behind the glass. His talent and immortal heroes are forever etched in the history of literature and in our imaginations.