After more than 30 years, David and Sara Godine are passing one of Dublin’s most-historic homes at Mountain View Farm on to a new family.

“We have had wonderful times here,” said David Godine, retired founder of David R. Godine Publishing. “We first came here when our son was just tiny.” 

David, his wife Sara and their dogs, Noble Rex and Dolly, are downsizing, and have happily sold the historic house to a family with relatives in Dublin. 

“It’s a big old house, and it requires a lot of maintenance. We are very happy about the buyer, and we’re sure they will love it here,” Godine said. 

The Godines, who moved in when their son and daughter were 3 and 5 years old, used Mountain View Farm as their retreat from Boston, especially in the winter. The family camps on an island in Maine for much of the summer. Looking around at the rooms full of antiques, Godine laughed and said, “The kids definitely do not want the furniture.” 

Mountain View Farm, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is known in the area from a series of historic photographs of author Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) sitting on the back porch, gazing out on Mount Monadnock. 

The house is included in the book “Monadnock Summer: The Architectural Legacy of Dublin, NH,”  by Will Morgan, which was published by Godine Publishing in 2011. 

“That is the best architectural study of Dublin which exists. The only other part of New Hampshire which is comparable as far as summer ‘cottages’ is the Cornish area, where Saint-Gaudens and Maxfield Parrish were,” Godine said. 

The original portion of the house was built in 1780 by Nathan Bixby, a Revolutionary War veteran and prominent Dublin resident of the era. In 1903, George and Alice Upton commissioned architect John Lawrence Mauran to build them a summer house at the site. The summer home, built in a Georgian Revival style, is attached to original Bixby farmhouse. 

In 1906, Twain rented the house for the summer from the Uptons. He had spent the previous summer in Dublin at a house called “Lone Tree Hill” on the east end of the lake, a part of town known to residents as the “Latin Quarter” because several painters, including Abbott Thayer and Joseph Lindon Smith, had studios nearby. After spending the summer of 1905 socializing with summer residents, the following year, Twain wanted a house in a quieter location. According to historic accounts, Twain felt Mountain View Farm, which is two miles from Dublin Village, was  better suited for writing. 

Twain wrote: “The summer homes … are sprinkled a mile apart, among the forest-clad hills, with access to each other by firm and smooth country roads which are so embowered with dense foliage that it is always twilight in there, and comfortable. The forests are spider webbed with these good roads, they go everywhere, but for the help of guide boards, the stranger would not go anywhere.”

Twain wrote a short story, “A Fable,” in the summer he spent at Mountain View Farm, but health problems limited his productivity. 

Twain’s first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, visited Mountain View Farm several times in the summer of 1906. At the time, Twain was still  grieving for his wife, Olivia, who died in 1904. A few years later, the couple’s youngest daughter, Jean, died of an apparent heart attack‚ the result of a epileptic seizure. Twain would only live four more years.

Twain’s time in Dublin is well documented. He famously walked out of a lecture at the Dublin Lake Club after spotting a young woman who had brought her knitting to the event, announcing to everyone present that he “would never play second fiddle to a sock.”

The most-famous photo of Twain sitting on the porch includes the three local kittens he adopted for the summer of 1906. 

The Godines, who first rented the house from a member of the Bourne family,  commemorate Twain’s summer in a corner of the house they call the “Mark Twain Room.”  They added more bookshelves to the room they call the the library, as well as to the Twain room in the front corner of the house. The Godines also enclosed part of the famous porch where Twain used to admire Monadnock, making it into a three-season room. 

The house has unusual features, including a tunnel-like passageway under the main staircase, leading from the entryway to the Twain room. The house has William Morris wallpaper and is decorated with family portrait and landscapes of New England. 

The dining room houses Godine’s antique book collection, which is being packed up and moved.  Godine is particularly interested in European féte books, which commemorated royal events such as coronations. 

Godine reflected on the family’s first attempt to buy Mountain View Farm from lifelong Dublin resident Luette Eaton Bourne, who recently died.

“The first time we made an offer, the bank turned us down,” Godine recalled. “Then they called back and had cut some land out of the deal, and we made an offer. It’s funny to think about that now.” 

Ron Chernow, whose new biography of Twain came out May 13, spent a week with the Godines at Mountain View Farm while researching the book. Chernow, who is best known for his bestselling biography of Alexander Hamilton, “really enjoyed himself at the farm,” according to Godine. 

“Twain said the summers he spent in Dublin were the happiest of his life,” Godine said. “It’s a magical place.”