Hartford Audio Tours

Hartford was one of the wealthiest cities in America in the second half of the 19th century, its fortunes built on insurance, manufacturing, and the Colt firearms empire. Mark Twain chose to live here from 1874 to 1891, building a Victorian gothic house in the Nook Farm neighborhood that he called 'the most beautiful house I ever lived in.' His neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had published 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' two decades earlier, lived next door. The Wadsworth Atheneum, opened in 1844, is the oldest public art museum in America and holds a Caravaggio that few people outside Hartford know exists.

The Connecticut State Capitol, designed by Richard Upjohn and completed in 1878 in a combination of Gothic and Renaissance Revival styles, is one of the more singular government buildings in the country -- its gilded dome and ornate stonework a reminder of when Hartford had the money to build as though money were not an object.

The Colt factory complex, with its distinctive blue onion dome, still dominates the south meadows area; Sam Colt built worker housing, a church, and a willow grove around it in a paternalist vision that felt enlightened in 1860 and is now a complex historic legacy.