Hartford

Neither Lia nor I had high hopes for Hartford, a city more associated with insurance headquarters than tourism, and the skyline of glass office towers along I-84 did little to change that first impression. But downtown, past the Connecticut State Capitol’s absurdly ornate gold dome, glinting like something out of a fairy tale rather than a statehouse, Hartford revealed itself slowly: a river city with genuine literary weight, a world-class museum, and a walkable core that rewards a little patience.

Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe

The city’s most surprising treasure sits in the leafy Nook Farm neighborhood, where Mark Twain built an eccentric, riverboat-inspired mansion in 1874 and wrote Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and much of his best work at a desk overlooking the lawn. Next door, almost close enough to have been neighbors on purpose, Harriet Beecher Stowe lived out her later years after writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We toured both houses in a single afternoon, and the proximity of these two towering, very different American writers, one a satirist chasing steamboat fortunes, the other an abolitionist reformer, said more about nineteenth-century Hartford’s ambitions than any plaque could.

The Wadsworth Atheneum

Hartford is also home to the Wadsworth Atheneum, founded in 1842 and often cited as the oldest continuously operating public art museum in the United States. We spent a rainy afternoon inside its castellated stone walls, moving from Hudson River School landscapes to a surprisingly deep collection of Caravaggio and Dutch masters, then out into a gallery of Surrealist and modern American work that felt entirely out of scale with the museum’s modest exterior. It’s the kind of institution you’d expect in a much larger city, tucked quietly into a capital of just over 120,000 people.

The Connecticut River and Bushnell Park

Behind the gold-domed Capitol, Bushnell Park spreads out as one of the oldest publicly funded parks in America, its 1914 carousel still spinning hand-carved horses for a dollar a ride. We rode it, slightly self-consciously, then walked down toward the Connecticut River, where a riverfront walkway has slowly reclaimed a waterfront long dominated by highway overpasses. In late afternoon, with the Capitol dome catching the last sun and rowers pulling long strokes on the river below, Hartford felt less like an insurance town and more like a capital quietly proud of its own history.

Getting There

Bradley International Airport, about fifteen miles north of downtown, serves Hartford with direct flights from most major U.S. cities. By car, Hartford sits roughly two hours from both New York City and Boston via I-84 and I-91. Amtrak’s Hartford Line and Northeast Regional trains connect directly to Union Station downtown, an easy option from New Haven, New York, or Springfield, Massachusetts, and downtown Hartford itself is compact enough to see mostly on foot.