When the Clemenses lived here there was a large greenhouse, built in 1871, on the lawn between their house and the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. However, it wasn’t until 1881 that Clemens became the owner of the structure. Lawyer Franklin Chamberlin, who had sold them their land, was preparing his property, across the lawn from the Clemenses house, for a large stone house to be built at the corner of Farmington Avenue and Forest Street. That house’s rear windows would gaze down on the Clemens front door, “big and high, and his kitchen in their faces’’ as neighbor Lilly Warner wrote. Negotiations led to the sale of a 100-foot strip of land as a buffer between the houses – a strip that included Chamberlin’s greenhouse.

Olivia Clemens loved having fresh flowers in the house and the family employed gardeners who tended to the new greenhouse plants and the many gardens around the property. Warner wrote of Olivia’s pride in presenting her with a vase of white roses “from her new greenhouse.” For the next decade, under the supervision of gardeners Daniel Molloy and John O’Neil, the greenhouse provided cut flowers for the Clemens’ tables and events. When daughter Susy Clemens held her 15th birthday party in March 1886, she was able to have unseasonable fresh nasturtiums on the table. And when the family left the house for Europe in 1891, the O’Neills, staying on as caretakers, sold perennials out of the greenhouse.

Sometime after 1910, the greenhouse was removed from the property. It may have found a home at a nursery in Bristol, Connecticut for the decades to follow, but as of 2020 the structure reported to be the Clemens’ greenhouse had been destroyed.