New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
CT Mark Twain property drops in price
“No real estate is permanently valuable but the grave,” Mark Twain jotted down in 1898 in a notebook. Some 125 years later, the Redding abode modeled on the villa where the humorist spent his final years is a little more affordable.
The owners of 30 Mark Twain Lane have dropped their asking price for the spring market of 2023 after successive years of having listed the property. At $3.25 million, the property can now be had for less than what financier Jake DeSantis and spouse Erica paid for it in 2003, when they grabbed at the chance to own a small cul-desac of American lore.
“To date, prospective buyers have generally been aware of, but not overly focused on, the historical Twain connection,” DeSantis told CT Insider in an email response to a query.
The Mark Twain Lane house is the second priciest on the Redding market — but now looking up at a new king of the hill, after the owner of an Umpawaug
Road estate where director Barry Levinson once lived yanked the property off the market entering this year, after getting no takers last fall at $11 million.
Another Umpawaug Road house is now tops in Redding at $8.5 million. In neighboring Ridgefield, an equestrian estate sold this month for $24 million, the biggest sale revealed in Connecticut
to date this year.
Twain spent the final few years of his life in the villa he called Stormfield, near where his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine lived in Redding. Twain organized fundraising drives for what would become today’s Mark Twain Library at the base of the hill where he had Stormfield built. Twain died April 21, 1910, after returning to Stormfield
from Bermuda, where he had been recuperating from an illness.
As a privately owned property not visible from Mark Twain Lane, the Redding abode carries little cache today compared to the author’s long-time home on Farmington Avenue in Hartford, where the Mark Twain House & Museum is among Connecticut’s most renowned historic draws.
But Twain imprinted his personality on Redding during his brief time there, hosting socials with visitors, including Easton resident Helen Keller.
There were fireworks by locals to welcome him to Redding; a Bethel shootout after a Stormfield burglary and subsequent police chase; and at the end, Halley’s Comet reaching becoming visible the naked eye, after Twain’s prediction the year before he would go out with the comet as he had entered the world 76 years before in Missouri, during the comet’s previous transit of the inner solar system.
The original villa caught fire in 1923 during renovations and was destroyed.