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The same railroad brought Mark Twain. He stepped off a special train at West Redding on June 18, 1908, seventy-two years old, to see for the first time the Italian villa his biographer had talked him into building. He named it Stormfield, after the sea captain whose story had helped pay for it. That autumn he gave the town a library from his own shelves and charged his guests a dollar apiece to build it a home. His daughter Jean died at Stormfield on Christmas Eve 1909. Twain had come into the world with Halley's Comet in 1835 and said he expected to go out with it; he died at Stormfield on April 21, 1910, a day after the comet rounded the sun. The house burned in 1923. The library he founded is still open.
He was the first of a line. Charles Ives built a house on Umpawaug Road in 1913 and put the old camp into music as Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut. Edward Steichen bought worn-out farmland at Topstone in 1929, bred delphiniums on it and photographed it for forty years; most of it is now a town park. And after Luttgen died in 1922 and Villa Linta burned, his ponds and carriage drives passed to Archer Huntington and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington, who left the land to the state. It opened as Collis P. Huntington State Park in 1973, with her bears and wolves at the gate. Joel Barlow, poet of the Revolution and later a diplomat, had been born here long before any of them, in 1754.
Why People Visit Redding
People come to Redding for what is not here: no highway, no strip, no crowd. They come for a Revolutionary War camp you can walk alone on a winter morning, for sixty miles of trails, and for the hills that drew Mark Twain, Charles Ives and Edward Steichen out of New York.
