Nook Farm spreads across the Asylum Hill section on the western edge of Hartford, and you have just walked into it. Imagine this ground once dominated by the Imlay farm in the early 1800s, stretching from present-day Imlay Street West to the North Branch of the Park River, and from Farmington Avenue south to the Park River. In 1853 John Hooker and his brother-in-law Francis Gillette purchased the pasture and woodland from William Imlay to develop real estate.
They built their own homes and sold parcels to relatives and friends, and out of that practical plan grew an art colony. Walk these streets in your mind and you’ll find the names who lived here: Hooker and his wife Isabella Beecher Hooker, the Gillettes, Charles Dudley Warner, Joseph Roswell Hawley, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, the Rev. Nathaniel Judson Burton and his wife Rachel Pine Chase Burton. Nook Farm became known for journalists, feminists, spiritualists, painters, writers, reformers and activists; it ‘developed into a tight-knit community through a web of family and business connections.’ Notice the Park River bending here, the very 'nook' that gave this writers' colony its name.