All things Twain

Unfortunately, we need to end this journey before we are done – many more things that were on our list that will need to hopefully be covered in a future trip. That being said, with the coming of having to disconnect our water at night due to the possibility of freezing, maybe that is a sign to be done anyway.

Our path took us right through Hannibal Missouri, the museum and boyhood home of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. This museum has been operated continuously since 1912. Being born in the very small town of Florida Missouri and being raised in a small Midwestern town on the Mississippi River gave the backdrop for his later writings. I am sure you all know this, but as a young boy he worked on riverboats. Because the channel in the Mississippi would shift constantly, and because the riverboats needed at least 12 feet of draft not to run aground, a depth spotter would be posted on the front of the ship with a rope that had knots in it every 6 feet – known as a fathom. Using old English and river talk – the word twain being used for the number 2 – the spotter would shout out “Mark Twain” meaning the ship was safe at 2 fathoms or 12 feet. Clemens later would adopt that name for his nom de plum. Interestingly, he used that name for the first time in 1862 while in Virginia City Nevada.

We visited Twain’s boyhood home as well as the boyhood home of the real Huckleberry Finn – only about a block apart. We could clearly see how his surroundings influenced his writing. Huckleberry Finn was actually Twain’s best friend, Tom Blankenship, and many of his later adventures were composed from experiences the two had as youth.

Across the street was his father JM Clemens’ office – the local Justice of the Peace. When he was 8, he was out late one night and didn't want to get scolded making his way into the home, so he climbed in a window in his father’s office and lay down on a couch. As he lay there, he thought he saw someone staring at him in the dark, and became alarmed. As the moon light shifted in the room, eventually the body of a dead man with a knife in his chest appeared. Apparently there was a quarrel between friends at a local tavern which ended in murder, and since the townsfolk had nowhere to store a body, they brought it and placed in the office of the JP. This gruesome scene ends up in one of Twain’s later writings.

Next to the Justice of the Peace office is the home of Becky Thatcher. Actually, this was home of Laura Hawkins who would be the inspiration for Becky Thatcher, the notorious love interest for Tom Sawyer. In the book, Becky is the daughter of Judge Thatcher – much as Twain was the son of the JP.  On the corner is where Grants Drug Store was housed – a place where the Clemens family liked to gather and where JM Clemens ultimately died.

At the end of Main Street is a statue of Mark Twain and Huckleberry Finn as they would have looked in boyhood. Up a flight of stairs from the statue is the former entrance to the original Mark Twain Memorial Bridge connecting Hannibal to the state of Illinois via old US Highway 36, now I-72. They claim that in the spring the lights on the bridge were so bright that they would attract mayflies so thick onto the bridge deck that snowplows would have to be commissioned to remove them – sometimes as deep as two feet!

Up more stairs is the Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse. Overlooking Hannibal and the Twain Museum, the lighthouse was felt to be a fitting tribute from the residents to the man who put this otherwise sleepy town on the national map.

One last flight of stairs takes you to the town’s best vantage point overlooking both the town and the Mississippi River. The overlook gives you a look at some of the nicer river bluff homes in Hannibal, the entire downtown area, and a panorama of the Mississippi River, including the new Mark Twain Memorial Bridge, now part of I-72.

We found some other fun stuff to take in. The Mark Twain Cave figures prominently in his writings. Discovered in 1819, the Cave was available for exploration when he lived in Hannibal growing up. Since there is no definitive evidence that Mark Twain ever explored the Cave, other than the prominence of caves in his writing themes, we decided not to pay an inside visit.

The Riverboat Mark Twain has a permanent mooring in Hannibal right in downtown. Folks are entertained with the lure of the River, as well as old time music, food and drinks. I imagine you can envision what it might have been to hear the spotters screaming “Mark Twain!”

A couple of other interesting facts were learned in our visit. As with most of the 1800’s era famous folk we have been vicariously living through, Twain had his share of trauma in life. When he was 22, he managed to get his 18 year old brother Henry a job on the Pennsylvania, a Mississippi riverboat. On his first trip out, the Pennsylvania had a fire and the boiler exploded – Twain was on the riverboat right behind the Pennsylvania. Twain was told that his brother was OK, but he later learned that Henry had been scalded badly by the exploding boiler, and within a week, Henry died of his injuries. Twain felt guilty for the rest of his life.

Twain actually went bankrupt in 1894. Although he had made substantial money in his writing, he lost it all in his investments. Fortunately he fell in with a knowledgeable financier who had him transfer all his copyrights to his wife to protect them from creditors, and then file bankruptcy. In 1895 he set out on a worldwide lecture tour, the proceeds of which allowed him to finally settle up his financial affairs.

Again we find a connection to where we have been on this trip. It turns out that Twain was good friends with Norman Rockwell, whose home and museum we had seen in New Hampshire. Rockwell agreed to illustrate early editions of Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn writings. The Twain Museum had both originals and prints of those illustrations on display – what fun!

Time to keep making our way back west.

Talk to you soon!