Wednesday, May 14 in the Quarry Farm Barn (7:00 PM)

Two Talks on the Restoration of the Mark Twain Study

The goal of the restoration of the Mark Twain Study windows was to return them to their original condition, to the degree possible, while respecting and saving the original materials—wood, glass, and hardware. The windows are “slip head” meaning the sashes move up into the wall cavity. Most of the sashes were stuck from careless painting and the sash cords that balanced the sashes were broken. Several broken panes had been replaced with plexiglass. We removed the sashes and boarded up the openings using the HUD do-no-harm method – no fasteners were inserted into the structure. Once in my workshop, we softened the putty and paint in a professional steambox and removed the glass. Any assumed original glass was labeled by location so it could be returned to the original light. The sashes were repaired as necessary, lightly sanded, primed with exterior oil primer, and painted with acrylic-urethane non-blocking paint. Some of the original three-strand twisted cord was still attached to the weights. We purchased a similar twisted hemp cord from a rope manufacturer in California. All of the original hardware remained with the Study but some of it was broken or badly rusted. We cleaned up the rusted pulleys in a chemical bath and painted hardware in a crockpot of boiling water and detergent. There were redundant hardware closures, and the dates when the various pieces were installed is unknown. The sash locks were original but need repairs; we don’t know when the spring pins and slide bolts were installed. We cleaned and reinstalled all of the hardware since photographic and paint layer evidence indicated all of it was early.

Steve Jordan graduated from Memphis State University (BA History) and Cornell University’s graduate program in Historic Preservation. He was the rehab advisor for the Landmark Society of Western New York for six years, an architectural conservator for Bero Architecture for four years, a contributing editor for Old-House Journal from 1998 through 2015, and operated a window restoration business for twenty years. He is the author of several books, including The Window Sash Bible; Storm Windows: A Comprehensive Guide to Wood, Wood Combination, Aluminum, and Interior Storm Windows;  Window Glazing: Puttying and Replacing Glass in Traditional Wood Windows.   Steve travels extensively to teach restoration skills.

As part of the restoration of the Mark Twain Study, an investigation was performed to determine the original finishes used on the building when it was constructed in 1874.  This talk will share the overall findings and methods utilized to uncover the materials and colors used on the interior and exterior building surfaces.  Given that the exterior originally had a “sanded finish” popular in the latter part of the 19th century, the Elmira College faculty and students’ sand research will also be shared.

Alicia Campbell, of Campbell Restoration and Consulting, has been passionately working on historic preservation projects since 1993.  She studied paint analysis at the Frank S. Welsh Co. in the late 1990s and has since performed independent paint analysis work in the Rochester, NY area.  During her 30 year corporate career, she continued her training in the building preservation crafts, and with her husband worked on restoring their five historic properties – receiving the “Historic Home Award” and the “Blood, Sweat, and Tears Award” from the Landmark Society of Western NY.  She is now dedicated to building restoration work full-time.

Wednesday, May 21 at The Quarry Farm Barn (7:00 PM)

“Mark Twain and the ‘Commerce of Disease”

Jess Libow, Haverford College

In Mark Twain’s unfinished 1905 novel, Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes, a scientist “studying micrology under co-founder of the American Society of Microbiology Prof. H[erbert] W[illiam] Conn,” is transformed by a magician into a chlolera germ living on the body of an immigrant “tramp” from Hungary. As Americans were becoming increasingly aware that something undetectable to the human eye could pose a deadly threat, Twain asks what the human body looks like through the eyes of the microbe. Among the Microbes asks us to imagine a human body as “the only world there is” for its microscopic inhabitants. My talk situates Twain’s novel alongside other texts of what Lorenzo Servitje and Kari Nixon have termed “the Bacteriological Age” that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. I illuminate the class critique embedded in Among the Microbes by reading it alongside texts such as Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), both of which depict unhygienic impoverished environments to convey the simultaneously microscopic and immense threat of disease. Throughout Among the Microbes Twain examines microbial labor in relation to that of American workers. For example, the narrator presents the treatment of the lowest class of microbes – called “soiled bread eaters” – in terms reminiscent of the status of American workers. He reports that the stomach in particular is “the richest” and “most fertile” terrain for microbial trade and transportation, and this commercially active stomach echoes the digestive system’s emergence as a key site of disease in Sinclair’s depictions of the diseased meat processed and packaged by immigrant laborers. Ultimately, I argue that the unseen germ of disease in Twain’s manuscript is both a metaphor for and materially tied to another equally ubiquitous public health threat posed by industrial capitalism.

Jess Libow is Interim Director of the Writing Program and Visiting Assistant Professor at Haverford College, where she teaches courses on health and activism in U.S. literature and culture. Her first book, Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States is forthcoming from UNC Press in fall 2025. Her writing has appeared in journals including American Literature, J19, ESQ, and Legacy, as well as the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, and The Lancet.

Wednesday, May 28 at The Quarry Farm Barn (7:00 PM)

“Mark Twain’s Political Critique of Divine Providence: Joan of Arc and Personal Recollections”

Bernard J. Dobski, Assumption University

Twain’s life-long engagement with institutional religion is well-documented. In two of his last complete novels, Twain sharpens and deepens that engagement; Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc explore the question of whether a providential god exists who secures justice in human life. Twain declares that he doesn’t settle that issue in the former book. Does he settle it in the latter, the book he also calls his “best”? I claim that he does: Personal Recollections effectively rules out the possibility of a providential God. The book’s argument against a providential God is grounded in its argument for man’s moral and political nature. And that nature, embodied chiefly in the novel’s narrator, the Sieur Louis de Conte, expressly hopes for a providential divinity that accords with and fulfills our longings for an earthly justice and nobility that would be impossible to fulfill on terms that those categories set for themselves.   

Bernard J. Dobski teaches politics and literature, political philosophy, and international relations at Assumption University in Worcester, MA. He has published widely on ancient Greek political thought, especially Thucydides, the plays and poetry of William Shakespeare, and the political wisdom of Mark Twain. Most recently, he is the author of Mark Twain’s Joan of Arc: Political Wisdom, Divine Justice, and the Origins of Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). He was a Quarry Farm Fellow in 2023 and is currently at work on a new book on Mark Twain’s engagement with the promise and perils of modernity, with a special focus on the character of its doctrine of individual rights.