Mark Twain Mini-Golf – Eldridge Park, Elmira, New York

Mark Twain’s substantial relationship with Elmira began in 1870 when he married a local woman named Olivia Langdon. His family spent more than twenty summers at Quarry Farm (the home of Olivia’s sister, Susan Crane), where Twain wrote his best-known works in his octagonal study perched high atop East Hill. The study was modeled after the pilot house of a Mississippi steamboat. Here he wrote such classics as Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Tramp Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. In 1952, Mark Twain’s Study, which was named the "#1 Literary Attraction in America" by USA Today, was moved from East Hill to the Elmira College campus.


In literature, bathos is an unintentional change in mood from the important and serious to the trivial or ridiculous. This reproduction of the study is bathos exemplified. It is located in Elmira’s Eldridge Park and serves as the office for the "Mark Twain Mini Golf" course.