of the Farmers’ Club
26 December 1870 • Buffalo, N.Y. (MS: Karanovich, UCCL 02788)
I thank you very much for your invitation to the Agricultural dinner, & would promptly accept it & as promptly be there but for the fact that Mr. Greeley is very busy this month & has requested me to clandestinely continue, for him, in the Tribune, for him, the articles headed “What I Know about Farming.” Consequently the necessity of explaining to the readers of that journal why buttermilk cannot be manufactured profitably ot outⒶemendation of at 8 cents a quart out of butter that costs 60 cents a pound, compels my stay at home until the article is written.
With reiterated thanks, I am—
Crandell later added the following commentary, beneath the signature:
Explanatory:
As Secretary of the New York Rural Club—Horace Greeley President—I was instructed to invite Mark Twain to one of our dinners. This is his reply. Time must have been about 1871.
He misremembered somewhat. The dinner was a 5 January 1871 reunion, at the Metropolitan Hotel, for a “number of members of the Farmers’ Club of the American Institute, who made a trip to California together last Summer” (“The New-York Farmers’ Club,” New York Tribune, 6 Jan 71, 8). The secretary of the Farmers’ Club was J. W. Chambers, not Crandell; the club’s president was Nathan C. Ely, not Horace Greeley. Greeley—whose “What I Know of Farming” appeared weekly in the New York Tribune throughout 1870—was president of the parent American Institute of the City of New York, founded in 1828 to promote advances in “agriculture, commerce, manufactures, and the arts” (Lossing, 169, 171; Wilson 1870, “City Register,” 42, 43). Possibly Crandell—identified by Albert Bigelow Paine as “A. B. Crandall, in Woodberry Falls, N. Y.” ( MTL , 1:180)—was its secretary. He was one of the speakers at the Farmers’ Club dinner. Clemens’s letter of regret was among several that were read.
MS, collection of Nick Karanovich.
L4 , 286; MTL , 1:180–81; Karanovich, item 21.
apparently acquired by Karanovich after 1986.
More information on provenance may be found in Description of Provenanceclick to open link.