Annis Ford Eastman

Annis “Bertha” Ford was born in Peoria, Illinois on April 24, 1852, the youngest of five daughters. Her father, George Ford, was known around the Midwest for making fine rifles but domestically had a violent temper and a strong insistence on patriarchal values. While George tried to force these principles on his daughters, it seems that his emphasis that his daughters were lesser-than combined with his propensity toward physical abuse instilled completely opposing ideas into them. It was at this early point in her life that Annis began her political and feminist writings.

After graduating from high school, Annis arrived at Oberlin College in Ohio, intending only to stay one year. It’s at Oberlin that she met Samuel Eastman, a relative of George Eastman of Eastman-Kodak fame. Samuel, attending Oberlin’s Divinity School, was a veteran of the American Civil War. During his service, he contracted typhoid pneumonia, from which he lost a lung and never fully recovered. During her year at Oberlin, Annis and Samuel fell in love and, after she left, the two began a correspondence. Samuel worked towards finishing his degree. Annis maintained that she would not marry him until he had a job. Once Samuel had graduated and received an offer to preach, the two married on August 25, 1875, and moved to Swampscott, Massachusetts.

Annis Ford Eastman
(Courtesy of the Chemung County Historical Society)

Samuel Eastman and Annis Ford Eastman
(Courtesy of the Chemung County Historical Society)

Samuel Eastman
(Courtesy of the Chemung County Historical Society)

By 1881, the couple had moved to Newport, Kentucky, and then to Canandaigua, New York, and had four children: Morgan, Anstice, Crystal, and Max. The Eastmans led a happy life in Canandaigua, but their happiness was disrupted when Morgan died at seven years old of malignant scarlet fever. Morgan’s death exacerbated Samuel’s already poor health. He would often return from preaching unable to stand. To help her husband, Annis began writing his sermons for him. Samuel’s condition worsened and he was forced to resign. To support the family, Annis decided to make use of her brief religious education and attempted to find her own parish.

People were not receptive to this decision. In an essay published in The Congregationalist, Annis described how people would avert their eyes from her in public and how they believed that should a woman speak in the pulpit, “‘we might as well lock the church door and throw the key in the well.’”^[1]> Despite the initial negative reception, Annis persisted and eventually won over her parish, which she kept for three years. During her tenure there, she was ordained by a group of Congregationalist ministers, including Elmira, New York’s Thomas K. Beecher.

Soon after, the Eastmans moved to West Bloomfield, a small town near Ithaca, New York, and Annis became the preacher of their Congregational Church. During her time in West Bloomfield, she began to speak and write on the national scale. She wrote articles for The Independent and the Congregationalist, but it seems that her oration skills surpassed her writings. In 1893, Annis was invited to speak at the Congress of Women in Chicago. Susan B. Anthony introduced her as the “movement’s main orthodox woman minister.”^[2] Here, she delivered a speech entitled “The Home and its Foundations” which emphasized how the sexes are dependent on one another but the way that late-19th century American society was structured prevented this cooperation. Only a few months later, Annis returned to Chicago to speak at the World’s Parliament of Religions. She took this opportunity to speak on the influence of religion on women.

Left to right: Thomas K. Beecher, Annis Ford Eastman, Samuel Eastman (Courtesy of the Chemung County Historical Society)

1894, Thomas K. Beecher made Annis and Samuel his associate co-pastors of Elmira’s Park Church. The Eastmans moved to Elmira and were given two corridors of rooms to live in above the church parlors. In 1896, Susy Clemens, Mark Twain and Olivia Langdon’s eldest daughter, died of spinal meningitis. Annis and Beecher co-officiated the funeral, marking the first recorded meeting between Annis Eastman and Mark Twain. In 1900, Beecher passed away, having designated the Eastmans as his successors.

During her tenure, Annis continued to publish articles in nationally famous journals. In 1903, she attended a summer school session at Harvard studying contemporary philosophy with peers such as William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana. This summer class influenced her decision to change the Park Church from Congregationalist to Unitarian. Though this was largely Annis’ decision, it had to be delivered through Sam in 1906 as “they would never take it from a woman.”^[3]

The Eastmans began summering on Seneca Lake in New York’s Finger Lakes region during their tenure at the Park Church. In 1901, Samuel built a cottage on a ten-acre plot on the lake which he called Cherith Cottage. Many of Elmira’s notable families bought property adjacent to the Eastmans’; this association became known as the Glenora Community. All costs and chores were shared communally, as organized by Annis. Other than enjoying the lake and the upstate scenery, those who stayed with the Glenora Community were there to engage intellectually with the residents. When it came to Sunday sermons, Annis would almost exclusively read secular literature and, if the mood struck her, she would let Max “preach” instead.

In April 1910, Mark Twain died and was buried in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery. As the pastor of the church Twain attended in Elmira, Annis was responsible for writing and delivering Twain’s eulogy. Annis was able to finish writing it but could not deliver it due to a brief illness. The same year, she began seeing the United States’ first psychotherapist, Dr. Abraham Brill, and was asked to become the dean of Barnard College, an all-woman’s liberal arts branch of Columbia University. However, she was never able to fully accept the offer.

Rev. Annis Ford Eastman
(Courtesy of the Chemung County Historical Society)

Annis Ford Eastman at Cherith Cottage, 1910
(Courtesy of the Chemung County Historical Society)

He changed his careers at the age of twenty-one in 1857 by becoming a cub pilot on the lower Mississippi under the tutelage of Captain Horace Bixby. After a regimen of study he later compared to “the efforts needed to acquire the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at a university,” Twain earned his pilot’s licences in 1859 and remained on the river until 1861, when the river was closed to commercial traffic by the start of the Civil War. After a two-week stint in a Missouri militia, Twain lit out for the territories in July 1861 when brother Orion was appointed secretary of Nevada Territory by President Abraham Lincoln. Soon after his arrival Twain traveled to the Esmerelda and Humboldt mining regions, where he prospected for silver and gold. He also began to submit occasional articles to Nevada papers. including the Virginia City, Nev., Territorial Enterprise. In September 1862 he starts to work on salary with the Territorial Enterprise and moved to the Comstock. In May 1864 he left for San Francisco and briefly became city editor of the San Francisco Call, a job he detested After quitting at the invitation of one of the owners, he became the San Francisco correspondent of the Territorial Enterprise and spent a season as a miner in Tuolumne and Calaveras Counties, California, where he heard the “jumping frog” sketch he rewrote for publication by the New York Saturday Press and San Francisco Californian. He was hired by the Sacramento Union to promote tourism and trade by contributing travel essays from Hawaii between March and July 1866. Upon his return, he inaugurated his career as a paid public speaker by touring California and Nevada with his lecture on the Sandwich Islands. He sailed for New York toward the close of the year to take advantage of the wider literary opportunities available to him there.

In June 1867, after serving as a correspondent of the New York Weekly and several other newspapers, Twain joined the company of sightseers who voyaged to Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, the first organized tour of its kind. He financed his trip by sending a series of over fifty travel letters to the San Francisco Alta California and other newspapers. After his return to New York in November 1867, he revised this correspondence for publication by the American Publishing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, under the title The Innocents Abroad (1869), which became his first bestseller. Much as he had launched a speaking tour upon his return from Hawaii, he began to deliver his lecture “The American Vandal Abroad” soon after the publication of his first travelogue.

In early October 1910, Annis suffered an unexpected stroke and was found by her husband clinging to a bedpost. Max and Crystal rushed to Elmira to see their mother in the days before her passing, though Annis never regained consciousness after the stroke. On October 22, 1910, Annis Ford Eastman passed away at 11:50 AM in her house in Elmira. She was fifty-eight years old. Other than her husband and three living children, she was survived by two sisters, both of whom had moved to California. Her body was cremated and her ashes were spread in Canandaigua, New York.

^[1]Annis Ford Eastman, “Glimpse of a Woman’s Pastoral Experience,” Congregationalist and Christian World 89, no. 9 (1904): 296.

^[2] Geoffrey N. Pollick, “Biographical Sketch of Annis Ford Eastman,” Alexander Street, accessed 10 April 2024, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1010922380

^[3] Annis Ford Eastman to Max Eastman in Enjoyment of Living, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948), 277.

Photograph of Mark Twain and George Washington Cable (26 September 1884). Appeared in Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition (1923), XXXV, facing 450.

By the mid-1880s, Twain was increasingly occupied by the publishing business he had established and named for his nephew and its president, Charles L. Webster. Unfortunately, the most successful books issued by the company were the first two: Huck Finn and PersonalMemoirs of U. S. Grant (1885). By the early 1890s, the company was in economic straits, in no small part because Twain had invested heavily in an advanced typesetting machine and subsidized its development for years, though in the end it was a financial failure, outmoded by the cheaper and more efficient linotype machine. Twain was advised and assisted by his friend Henry Huddleston Rogers, vice-president of the Standard Oil Company, and he published a knot of works in 1889-1896: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The American Claimant (1892), Merry Tales (1892), “Extracts from Adam’s Diary” (1893), “Is He Living or Is He Dead?” (1893),“The Esquimau Maiden’s Romance” (1893), “Travelling with a Reformer” (1893), “The Californian’s Tale” (1893), The £1,000,000 Bank-Note and Other New Stories (1893), Tom Sawyer Abroad (1893-94), “In Defense of Harriet Shelley” (1894), “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story” (1894), Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins (1894), “How to Tell a Story” (1895), “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” (1895), “Mental Telegraphy Again” (1895), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1895-1896), and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896). But all to no avail. Webster & Co.filed for bankruptcy in April 1894, its end hastened by the financial Panic of 1893. Twain repaid all the creditors and recouped his lost fortune by embarking on a round-the-world speaking tour across North America, to Australia, New Zealand, India, Pakistan, and South Africa. On the basis of this journey, he also wrote and published his fifth and final travelogue entitled Following the Equator in the U.S. and More Tramps Abroad (1897) in the U.K.

Many of these works were based on more his reading than his own past experience, including the medieval fantasy Connecticut Yankee; a parody of the “Higher Criticism” of biblical scholarship, “Adam’s Diary” (1893); the Tom-Huck sequels; and the hagiography of Joan of Arc. Even Pudd’nhead Wilson, though set in a reimagined Hannibal, contains elements of modern detective fiction and its plot turns on a clue Twain gleaned from Francis Galton’s Finger Prints (1892). Ironically, however, even as his reputation grew, Twain became the target of some librarians and other custodians of culture who tried and sometimes succeeded in censoring his writings, particularly Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, by removing them from the shelves of public libraries in such towns as Concord, Mass., Denver, Des Moines, and Brooklyn.

Photograph of (left to right) Sam Robb, A.E. Goodman, Ernest John Harrison, and Mark Twain (18 August 1869, Vancouver, B.C.).
Appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, 15 (October 1898), 5.

Twain’s final years were punctuated by a series of disappointments and personal tragedies. His daughter Susy died in Hartford from spinal meningitis in August 1896 soon after Twain, Livy, and Clara arrived in London at the close of their trip around the world. The family never fully recovered from her death. They remained in Europe—first England, later rural Switzerland and Vienna—until October 1900, returning to the U.S. only after living most of the previous decade abroad. Livy’s fragile health began to decline until she was often quarantined. A corresponding shift toward social satire occurred in Twain’s brand of humor, as in his sardonic tale “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899) and acerbic essay “Christian Science and the Book of Mrs. Eddy” (1899). Long a political “mugwump” or independent, he became at the turn of the century an outspoken critic of imperialism, whether by Britain in South Africa, Russia in Manchuria, Belgium in the Congo, or the U.S. in the Philippines, particularly in such pieces as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), “The Czar’s Soliloquy” (1905), and “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905). He ridiculed the New York City corruption of Tammany Hall and the political authority wielded by the Church of Christian Science and voiced his fear it would become an American state religion. He condemned lynch law in the South, though he suppressed his essay “The United States of Lyncherdom” lest it damage his literary sales, and he embargoed the publication of “The Mysterious Stranger” (written 1897-1908), “Letters from the Earth” (written 1904-1909), and most of his autobiography (dictated 1906-1909) so that he could freely express opinions without jeopardizing the income his heirs would earn from his literary estate.

Photograph of Mark Twain and John T. Lewis at Quarry Farm (1 July 1903). Appeared in Ladies’ Home Journal, 20 (November 1903), 37.

Photograph of Mark Twain (1903). Appeared in Passaic, N.J., Herald, (16 February 1903, 4).

Photograph of Mark Twain (4 January 1906). Appeared in Woman’s Home Companion, 33 (April 1906), 29.

Twain also continued to travel widely during the last decade of his life. Invited to receive an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Missouri in June 1902, he enjoyed a sentimental journey back to Hannibal, Columbia, and St. Louis. On the advice of Livy’s physicians, the Clemens clan decamped in October 1903 to a villa near Florence, Italy, where Livy died in June 1904. He returned to the U.S. for her funeral, summered in the Berkshires, and settled that fall near Washington Square Park in New York. Invited to receive an honorary LL.D. from Oxford University—what he considered the highest honor of his life—he sailed to England in June 1907 and was feted there for three weeks. Throughout this period, of course, Twain continued to write for publication: “A Double-Barreled Detective Story” (1902), a parody of the Sherlock Holmes fiction; “Eve’s Diary” (1905), a companion to “Adam’s Diary”; and What Is Man? (1906), his deterministic “bible,” first issued in a limited edition and without signature; “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1907-1908), a pioneering work of science fiction; and Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), his contribution to the debate over the authorship of the plays attributed to William Shakespeare. Twain was also active in lobbying the U.S. Congress to enact copyright reform as a member of the American Copyright League. He also enrolled a dozen or so pre-pubescent girls, so-called “angelfish” or honorary granddaughters, in an “aquarium” of visitors and correspondents.

At the suggestion of his official biographer and literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937), Twain bought a farm in rural Connecticut in 1906 and built a mansion there modeled on an Italian villa and designed by John Mead Howells, the son of his friend W. D. Howells (1837-1920). He christened the mansion “Stormfield,” after the story he sold to Harper’s Monthly to finance the final stages of its construction. His daughter Clara married the Russian-born musician Ossip Gabrilowitch there in October 1909 and his daughter Jean died there from a heart attack while bathing on Christmas Eve 1909. Twain died there of congestive heart failure on 21 April 1910 and his body was interred in the Clemens family plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, New York.

Photograph of Mark Twain in regalia (July 1907). Alternate for St. Louis Post-Dispatch, (6 October 1907), 61.

Photograph of Mark Twain in library at Stormfield (5 January 1909). Appeared in Book News Monthly, 38 (April 1910), 587.

Photograph of Jean Clemens and Mark Twain (1909). Appeared in Philadelphia Inquirer (26 December 1909), 18.

Gary Scharnhorst

Gary Scharnhorst is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico and editor of the journal American Literary Realism. He is the former president of the Western Literature Association and former chair of the American Literature Section of the Modern Language Association. He is also the author of over a hundred scholarly articles and author or editor of over sixty books, including Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (University of Alabama Press) and the three-volume Life of Mark Twain (University of Missouri Press).

Professor Scharnhorst has participated in a large number of CMTS events and lectures, including:

Gary Scharnhorst, “Mark Twain: Social Satirist” (May 1, 2024 – Quarry Farm Barn)
Gary Scharnhorst, “Mark Twain’s Interviews: The Final Report” (October 10, 2007 – Quarry Farm Barn)

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