ARTSCULTURE · HISTORICAL MARKER
Mark Twain
Arts & Culture
4
Samuel Langhorne Clemens died at his home, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut, on Thursday, April 21, 1910, in his seventy-fifth year, with his daughter Clara, her husband Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine nearby; beside him lay Carlyle's The French Revolution: A History and his glasses. The next day his body was placed in a mahogany coffin and lay overnight in the library at Stormfield, and on Saturday, April 23, a simple service at the Brick Church was led by the Reverends Dr. Van Dyck and Dr. Twichell before the coffin was taken by rail to Elmira. There, under a tent on the grassy slope of the Langdon plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, he was buried beside his wife and children as Rev. Samuel E. Eastman conducted a brief service. Also buried in the family plot are Langdon Clemens, who died of diphtheria at eighteen months; Olivia Susan Clemens, who died at twenty-four of spinal meningitis while her parents were abroad; Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens, who died at fifty-nine in Florence, Italy; and Jane Lampton Clemens, called Jean, who suffered from epilepsy and drowned in a bathtub at twenty-nine. Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch Samossoud, the only surviving child, married Ossip Gabrilowitsch, later conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and they had Clemens's only grandchild, Nina Gabrilowitsch; after Ossip's death at fifty-eight, Clara married Jacques Sammosoud, and Nina later died unmarried of a drug overdose in Hollywood, California. Other family members buried there include Charles Jervis Langdon, his family and descendants, and Susan and Theodore Crane. A large Westerly granite shaft depicting Samuel Clemens and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, erected by Clara Clemens and designed by Ernfred Anderson, weighs eight tons, and the Langdon family monument contains four religious symbols: Alpha and Omega, the symbol of the Trinity, the monogram meaning "In His Sign," and a formee cross; Samuel Clemens chose the inscriptions on the stones of Susy, Jean, and Olivia. Woodlawn Cemetery was established after Elmira's leaders recognized in 1858 the need for another cemetery, obtained a $10,000 loan from the state legislature, and purchased three twelve-and-one-half-acre plots; it was expanded in 1874, 1899, and 1920 to about 184 acres, and this area contains many of Elmira's oldest and wealthiest founding families.
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