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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.
The nineteenth century was farms, limekilns and one factory. In 1818 Benjamin Gilbert began weaving horsehair sieves in his cellar at Georgetown, on the town's southwest corner. The firm that became Gilbert & Bennett moved from hair to wire, and when the Civil War cut off its Southern customers it painted its surplus wire cloth and sold it for windows — the firm is credited with the first woven-wire insect screening. The railroad came through in 1852, with stations at West Redding, Topstone and Georgetown. The wire mill ran until the end of the twentieth century.
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.
