This year, we’ve focused on adding programs that help us celebrate the 150th anniversary of the house, which was completed in 1874. Last spring, we debuted Clemens Family Chopped, a program in which high school students use the family’s check register and cookbooks, as well as monthly food prices from the Hartford Courant in 1874, to design and price out menus for a six-course supper in the Clemens family dining room.
This program helps students explore how season, climate, regional food cultures, and networks of global exchange would have shaped how the kitchen staff of the Clemens household went about its work.
Building on the success of Chopped, we’ve added a related food program for middle grades: Sam’s Specials. In A Tramp Abroad, Clemens famously bemoaned the food in Europe, and made a list of all the foods he couldn’t wait to eat when he got home. But for an accomplished traveler like Sam, could the ingredients for his dream meal actually be sourced in one town?
In Sam’s Specials, students examine grocery listings from all around the country to determine if any of them had the regional food culture and trade connections to produce a six-course meal drawn from Sam’s favorites. The listings all come from the same moment–the third week of September, 1874–allowing students to see what was on offer in Iowa, North Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Spoiler alert: the only place to get Sam’s favorite frogs’ legs that week was Boston!
For our youngest visitors, To Make A Meal takes those same records about the family’s cooking and dining in 1874 and uses them to engage children’s love of sorting and categorizing! Using a grocery bag of blocks made to represent the foods the Clemens family purchased and ate in a specific month in 1874, students work together to categorize those foods in a dozen different ways, exploring how climate, culture, geography, transportation, money, and taste all shape the foods we choose to eat.
We’re really excited to have these new programs on the roster. Spending time with the Clemens family’s records and cookbooks means that everyone in the interpretation department has become really familiar with some fascinating Gilded Age foods, recipes, and preparations! For instance, we all love this loving description of how to prepare salmon trout, from Marion Harland’s Common Sense in the Household: “Those who have eaten this prince of game fish in the Adirondacks, within an hour after he has left the lake, will agree with me that he never has such justice done him at any other time as when baked with cream. Handle the beauty with gentle respect while cleaning, washing, and wiping him, and lay him at full length, still respectfully, in a baking-pan, with just enough water to keep him from scorching.”
To Make A Meal is also part of our expanding roster of civics programs supported through Civics Education for Connecticut Students, a partnership of five museums funded through a three-year federal earmark. This funding supports free or deeply discounted civics programs for Connecticut students grades K-5. At The Mark Twain House & Museum, that funding applies to three programs: To Make A Meal (K-5), Growing Up In The Gilded Age (K-3), and A Place For Every Thing (3-5).
We’re in year 2 of the funding right now, and we’ve made some changes based on what we learned last year. This year, visits to the museum for our K-5 civics programs will be offered free to all Connecticut students from Priority and Title I schools around the state.
Connecticut Priority districts are ones in which at least 40% of students district-wide qualify for free or reduced cost lunches. But many individual schools around the state–in rural, urban, and suburban towns alike–meet that same threshold, even if their full districts don’t. Those individual schools–nearly 400 of them in Connecticut–can now access free, high-quality, civics-based field trips at our museum.
As always, though, support from a number of funders allows The Mark Twain House & Museum to provide all Connecticut priority district students with free visits and funding for transportation, regardless of program and grade level, and to keep the cost of visiting at $10-$12 for all other students.
We’re so excited for student visits to begin this month. To learn more about all of our field trip options, visit our field trip page at https://www.marktwainhouse.org/edu/field-trip