1 Olivia Lewis Langdon had arrived in Hartford by 12 October, accompanied by her son, Charles. She remained with her pregnant daughter until 29 December (OC to MEC, 13 Oct 71, CU-MARK; 26 Dec 71 to OLC, n. 2).

2 Fires raging through the pine lands bordering Lake Michigan and Saginaw Bay in the second week of October had engulfed towns and left hundreds of inhabitants dead, thousands homeless, and destroyed many millions of feet of valuable timber. The first detailed newspaper reports of the disaster began appearing on 13 October. Among the lumbermen potentially affected were Henry C. Spaulding and Henry W. Sage. Spaulding, father of Olivia Clemens’s close friends Clara and Alice, was an Elmira dealer in lumber, coal, and building supplies. Sage (1814–97), was head of H. W. Sage and Company, which operated a large lumber mill on Saginaw Bay. In 1906 Clemens recalled that he had gotten Sage, “an old and warm friend and former business partner of Mr. Langdon,” to provide counsel and financial assistance to J. Langdon and Company when the firm was in temporary straits after Langdon’s death (AD, 23 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:137–38; New York Tribune: “Further Particulars of the Forest Fires in Michigan,” 13 Oct 71, 5; “The Forest Fires,” 19 Oct 71, 1; L3, 182 n. 6; Boyd and Boyd, 2, 197).