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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.
What they all came for was the country, and the town decided to keep it. The farmers had gone west after the Erie Canal opened, and the forest crept back over their stone walls; by the 1930s Redding was woods again. In 1965 residents founded a land trust. When the Great Ledge above Devil's Den came on the market in 1988, the town bought it. Today nearly forty percent of Redding is protected, with about sixty miles of trails, most of them cleared each year by volunteers.
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.
