Mark Tawin Sleeps Here – Woodlawn Cemetery, Elmira, New York

The most prominent resident of the town of Elmira, NY was the author Mark Twain. Twain married Olivia Langdon, a woman from a prominent local family, and they summered here for more than twenty years. Twain, who died in 1910, was buried in Elmira alongside his beloved wife and children, and his memory is honored throughout the year by visitors to his gravesite in Woodlawn Cemetery.



"On Thursday, April 21, 1910, Samuel Langhorne Clemens died at his home, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut. Beside him on his bed lay a beloved book – Carlyle’s The French Revolution: A History – and near the book his glasses, pushed away a few hours before. He was in his seventy-fifth year. His daughter, Clara, and her husband, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, and the humorist’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, had been by the bed waiting for the end. The following day, Clemens’ body was placed in a mahogany coffin Is here he lay overnight in the library at Stormfield. On Saturday, April 23, the hearse was brought to the Brick Church, where a simple service was offered by the Reverends Dr. Van Dyck and Dr. Twichell. Three or four thousand people passed in review. The coffin was then brought to Elmira by rail." (from The New York Times, April 22, 1910).


Under a tent on the grassy slope of the Langdon plot in Woodlawn Cemetery, with rain beating fiercely against the canvas cover, a little group of mourners silently watched as the body of Samuel L. Clemens was lowered into an evergreen-lined grave beside those of his wife and children. Rev. Samuel E. Eastman, pastor of the Park Church and a close friend of the dead humorist, conducted a brief but simple service, and Mark Twain’s first pilgrimage was at an end. Tonight he lies sleeping under a grave piled high with flowers, the tributes of loving friends from far and near." (from the Elmira Advertiser, April 25, 1910).