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Tom Sawyer's Town
By JERRY ALLEN
Supper-bound townsmen passed on Main Street and glanced with casual interest at the train that had settled on the tracks with the unconcern of a country dog.
On the Mississippi a few feet away a downriver towboat blinked its headlights in cheery salute as it headed toward K ew Orleans. The broad river shone in the spring moonlight. a still, unrippled highway, heavy with fresh rains.
Smells of supper came from open kitchen windows, tantalizing smells, and the town in ?appetite waited. From his porch a stranger called a neighborly greeting as I passed.
"Fine evening!"
Here in the spatter of lights circling back from the river lay a town with legends as world-known as the Alps-crossing Carthaginian general, with his laboring elephants, from whom it took its name.
Cupped on the shore of the often-flooding Mississippi , Hannibal lies in a valley edged by 225-foot-high Lovers' Leap (map, page 125). It has neither beaches nor night clubs -and teen-agers are subject to a 10 o'clock curfew. Crowds come by the busload and in streams of family cars, not for the town's majestic scenery, its climate or resort life, but because here, little changed by time, are the haunts of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Children, and the parents who tag along with them, have made it one of the most popular home towns in the United States.
Famed Through Fiction for 80 Years
Given its fame through fiction, through a book published 80 years ago, Hannibal is Tom Sawyer's town. In it Mark Twain, who is rarely remembered by his real name of Samuel Clemens, spent his boyhood years; later he wrote that boyhood into books, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn among them.
The Pied Piper call of those books has brought on a single day more than a thousand children to Hannibal, some from as far away as New York. This year a special train brought 1,200 children from St. Louis. On a recent Memorial Day more than 1,500 visitors went through the 1844 home of the American writer better known abroad than any other of his time-a favorite of such men as Kipling, Darwin, Shaw, and Freud.
"He is the biggest man you have on your side of the water," Kipling wrote from England, "and don't you forget it."
Today an echo of Kipling's opinion comes from the East he immortalized. "How could I be hostile to a country that produced Mark Twain?" asked Ceylon's new Prime Minister Bandaranaike, describing his international views after his April, 1956, election.
So closely has Hannibal become linked with its author that the town is seldom thought of as having a history beyond 1839, when a four-year-old red-headed boy came there to live and stayed until he was 17.
Yet Hannibal, a river landing selected from the vast Louisiana Purchase territory, is older than the Oregon Trail. Its first settler, Moses Bates, arrived in 1819. The settlement that grew 100 miles northwest of St. Louis took the name of Hannibal originally given by a pioneer surveyor to the stream that flowed through the site, the stream that Sam Clemens and every boy since has known as Bear Creek.
It is more than a century since Judge Clemens and his family lived in the white house on Hill Street and his next-toyoungest son had the adventures he credited to Tom Sawyer. A pioneer village of some 1,000 people and an important steamboat port on the Mississippi then, Hannibal today is a thriving city of more than 21,000 residents, of 7,000 homes, 8,000 telephones, 5,300 motorcars, 360 stores-and an unused wharf.
A lone iron ring remains in 127 the cobblestone wharf, the last of many to which steamboats were tied when cargoes were tobacco and slaves. The wharf now serves as a parking space for cars.
Stern-wheelers, puffing black smoke, are rare on the river today, though the city seal still bears the steamer that became its emblem in 1845. Xow 3.000-horsepower towboats pound by, pushing strings of loaded barges. In one recent year towboats moved 82 million tons of cargo along the 1,800 miles of Mississippi between New Orleans and St. Paul.
In new towboat style the active days of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi are back again on the river where 98 years ago he steered such packets as the Aleck Scott, driving them over the twisting reaches by a pilot's schooled memory for landmarks. Today diesel-engined workboats, costing as much as $1,500,000 each, churn along, steering by radar, flashing strong headlights at night, tooting helloes as they pass by day.
Widow's Lamp Guided River Pilots
For the powerfully lighted towboats the white Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse on Cardiff Hill is no longer urgent. In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the writer's birth, Hannibal erected the lighthouse in 1935 on the site of the home of Mrs. Holliday, the original of the Widow Douglas in Tom Sawyer. When Mark Twain was on the river, she kept each night a lamp burning in her window as a guide to steamboat pilots.
As much in the past as Mrs, Holliday's lamp is the leadsman's call of "Mark twain! " that once told a pilot of a channel's safe water ?depth of two fathoms, or 12 feet. Sounding by echo) towboat pilots seldom need a leadsman or hear that call.
Like a bystander, Hannibal watches the busy Mississippi traffic, which has doubled since 1946. The shore trembles as the waterborne train goes by with as many as eighteen 200-foot barges in a tow.
The Mississippi is almost a mile across at Hannibal, and the surging river has often flooded the town, overflowing the levee, calling for boats to be used on Main Street. At its spring crest of 18 feet it hurries floating trees and logs along and even shifts the land. The river is forever building towheads) young islands) that old-timers in Hannibal have watched grow.
One island still dominates the others- Jackson's Island) near the Illinois shore. Wild land and federally owned, it is the tangled jungle where Huck and Jim camped before starting their never-forgotten raft trip down the Mississippi. Of its many names the one given it by the author of Tom Sawyer- Jackson's-has lasted (below).
Known during Xlark Twain's boyhood as Glasscock's Island, it is still adventure ground for boys. On hot summer days Hannibal boys go over to it in boats, campfire cook the fish they catch, swim naked from its muddy banks.
"Whether their folks know it or not, boys are always swimming in the river," Chester Sankpill, owner of Hannibal's boatyard, says as he looks out over the stream that goes so swiftly by his door.
"Every little while I get called to run my boat out after someone drowning. Boys are all the time swimming in the Mississippi, out in boats, exploring the islands, fishing. They don't change much."
Fishing in the Xl ississippi is an industry ?in Hannibal, in addition to being the pastime of every man and boy. Motorboating alongside a fishermen's pier, I watched men who get their living from the river sorting out the day's catch. In the haul was a 2S-pound catfish, one of the Mississippi blue cats, which occasionally reach several times that size.
Big fish are common in the river and in the branches and the creeks that feed it. Bear Creek is a favorite with anglers, and on its banks of a summer afternoon, you still find old-timers leaning on canes, watching staked lines for the quiver that means a bite. Fathers,
using bread balls for bait, habitually fish after work, rowing their sons along the stream in which Mark Twain said he "drowned ... every summer."
Two miles south of George Plekow, Three Lions downtown Hannibal, on the Mark Twain Trail, is the cave Tom Sawyer made famous and Mark Twain knew so well. It has fascinated Hannibal youngsters since Jack Simms, a hunter chasing a fox, discovered it in 1819.
A number of legends have grown up about the cave. One story says that it was a hideout of Jesse James, the l\Iissouri-born outlaw of the 1870's. The cave is also believed to have been a station on the C nderground Railroad of slavery days.
In the eerie miles of underground passages l\Iark Twain as a boy had the adventures he wrote into Tom Sawyer. "Under the Cross" Tom and Huck found the treasure buried by Injun joe-s-and the rock seams still form that ceiling cross that was a landmark for boy pirates a century ago.
A few years ago the cave \vas bought by the late Judge Evan T. Cameron, who strung a mile of its corridors with elec?tric lights. Long before, the original entrance and the openings that once admitted small boys crawling on their stomachs were sealed and the present entrance was opened. Last year more than 40,000 paid admission to follow guides through the bat-infested maze.
"It's easy to get lost down here," says Karl Jacobson, a high school boy who takes visitors through during vacations. "I played around in the cave for two years, learning it by candlelight and flashlight, before I could become a guide. We don't take anybody into the dangerous parts, where the ledges are narrow and slippery. Sometimes people stray down here, but we've never lost anybody permanently,"
The limestone formations in the cave have names as old as the first visitor-the Pantry, the Alligator, Aladdin's Palace, Fat Man's Xl isery-i-but the one that halts wide-eyed child tourists is the rock Love Seat where Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher huddled together as their last candle burned to the end, leaving them in the blinding dark,
The scene of the two lost and starving children is one every American schoolboy knows, but it stemmed from an actual day when Sam Clemens and Laura Hawkins (the original of Becky Thatcher) shivered in a dank tunnel of the cave waiting to be found by the search party hunting them, Twain's Friends People His Books
Like Laura Hawkins, the "best girl" of his boyhood, many of Xlark Twain's early friends were pictured in his books. Tom Blankenship, a Hannibal boy with a twin sister named Martha, became Huckleberry Finn. One of eight children in a family too poor to own shoes, Tom went barefoot, roaming the countryside during the sunny hours of school. Tattered and woods-wise, he was the envy of every boy in town. Years later Twain said he had heard that Tom Blankenship west as a young man and became a of the peace in Montana.
The old Hannibal home of the Blankenships, a rickety dwelling at the end of Dead Juan's Alley, was torn down long ago. In 1926 a statue of Tom and Huck was put up at the foot of Cardiff Hill. Today the town that Mark Twain in fiction called "St. Petersburg" is still haunted by the ragamuffin Blankenship boy whom everyone knows as Huck.
A ghost no less active is Injun Joe. More than a character out of Tom Sawyer, he was a man once known to many now living in
Hannibal. A kindly old ragpicker toward whom children were cautious, he was looked after for years by the townspeople, who liked him in spite of their protest that "he never did a day's work in his life."
Fables of Injun Joe Live On
Injun Joe died in the town of his fame some years ago, an aged and wrinkled halfbreed Indian. Yet the awesome fables about him continue hardy and spiked with menace, as a comment I overheard one day on Cardiff Hill shows.
"This is the place where Indian Bill murdered the widow," a schoolgirl, garbling her facts a little, told her parents. It was a clear day, a soft time of year, and the locust blooms were fragrant on the hill. But the mother looked warily around for "Indian Bill" and uneasily herded her family from the treacherous ground of fiction.
Guides at the cave invariably point to a spot near the entrance where "Injun Joe died just where you're standing." And, invariably, adult visitors and children alike step hastily away.
Laura Hawkins, born Annie Laurie Hawkins, also has a strong inheritance in present-day Hannibal. More than a century ago she was a little girl in pigtails who lived across the street from Sam Clemens and became his first sweetheart. Being in love with her, and having an apple, he gave her the core.
As Becky Thatcher, she is ever a little girl to readers. But Hannibal knew her for many years as Mrs, Laura Hawkins Frazer, she who managed the city orphanage, an outstanding figure in the community until, at the age of 91, she died in 1928 (above). Her granddaughter, Mrs. Clara Frazer Fisher, grew up in Hannibal and lives there still. Today, with not a Clemens or a Blankenship living in the town, she is perhaps the most direct descendant of a famous cast (opposite.)
Many of the buildings Mark Twain knew in Hannibal are still in use. The house where Becky Thatcher lived, the old Hawkins home, has a bookstore in one wing, a cafe in the other. Two upstairs rooms have been restored to the Mark Twain era, and in the ?"Becky Thatcher bedroom" clothes such as Laura wore are draped across the bed.
The home where Mark Twain spent his boyhood is restored throughout, even to "the room Tom Sawyer slept in "-the bedroom he shared with two of his brothers. Through its back window Sam Clemens, at a catcall signal from Tom Blankenship, dropped to the woodshed roof and the ground for frequent moonlight prowls. Tom Sawyer did it too.
Adjoining the white clapboard boyhood home, with its memories of Judge Clemens and his perpetual-motion machine and of Mrs. Clemens with her kitchen livened by 19 stray cats, stands the Mark Twain Museum opened by the city in 1937. Along with the scarred cherry desk on which Tom Sawyer was written, a pilot's wheel from an old Mississippi steamboat, the author's spidery early typewriter, and a lock of his hair, are hundreds of other items associated with Mark Twain (page 130). Xlost of the exhibits from his ?private life were lent by Mrs. Clara Clemens Samossoud, of Mission Beach, California, the only one of his four children still living.
Both the museum and the home are cityowned, and admission is free. Built by ::\Iark Twain's father when the town was a pocket in the wilderness, the home was given to the city in 1912 by a Hannibal lawyer, George A. Mahan, and his family, with the stipulation that it should never be used for profit.
Famous Fence Kept White
The "fence Tom Sawyer whitewashed" stands beside the home on Hill Street, a replica of the one it was young Clemens's chore to brighten (page 135), Today's fence has been painted, but it is beginning to peel, When it looks properly aged it will get a coat of whitewash of the original formula,
In Hannibal the art of whitewashing has not been lost, Walking up a residential street on a Sunday morning, I saw a boy with a long-handled brush and bucket of white" wash givmg a last quick swash to a garden wall. I could hear the juicy swipes and see a fishpole leaning against the porch. A moment later the fishpole was gone-and the boy.
The small frame law office where Judge Clemens carried on his practice and presided as justice of the peace during Hannibal's frontier days was moved last year from its original site on Bird Street. Age and the recurrent high waters of the Xlississippi had weakened the dark decaying courtroom that Mark Twain recalled in Innocents Abroad, the courtroom where he, a schoolboy, came upon the corpse of a stabbed man lying on the moonlit floor.
Volunteers Saved Landmark
The precarious slant of the waterlogged 1840 building gave warning to Hannibal in the spring of 1955. The town speedily set about saving it: some people gave their labor, some donated land, and many contributed money. It was taken down in sections and rebuilt on a donated lot beside the Becky Thatcher house. Today its restored courtroom appears as it was when the stern father of Mark Twain climbed on his three-legged stool and rapped for order and a jury of pioneers sat on a puncheon bench before him.
The printing office where Mark Twain learned his original trade of setting type was pulled down in 1954. In that building on Main Street he was, at 12, a printer's devil on the Missouri Courier. His pay for a seven-day week was room and skimpy board, plus a suit of hand-me-down clothes each year.
His older brother Orion started a rival paper, the Western Union, and Mark Twain moved over to it. A skilled printer and shop foreman at the age of 15, he began his writing career on that paper and at that age. The parlor of the home on Hill Street, now so severely neat, was for a time the printing office of the merged TV estern Union and Journal, where the three Clemens boys ran their paper through the press.
It was not a great success, in spite of Orion's boast in one of his 1851 issues that "we have a larger circulation, by over one hundred, than any other paper published in this section." That still gave the paper on which Mark Twain wrote "Our Assistant's Column" a circulation of only 550, give or take a few.
Hannibal in those days owed its livelihood to the Mississippi. In the year 1847 steamboats took from its wharves freight valued at $1,200,000-a staggering figure then, although today one towboat on a single haul has pushed cargo worth twice that sum.
The river was responsible, too, for the site's discovery and settlement. Local historians credit Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan Recollect friar born in Belgium, with being the first white man to step ashore at the site of present-day Hannibal. Hennepin was 39 when he sailed in 1679 with La Salle from Canada through the Great Lakes to explore the unknown West. At Lake Peoria on the Illinois River the expedition divided, La Salle sending Michel Aco and Father Hennepin down the Illinois to its junction with the Mississippi, and up that great river toward the north. On their canoe voyage upstream to Minnesota, Hennepin made a landing at the Hannibal site. La Salle was killed by his own men in Texas, but Hennepin recorded their Mississippi discoveries and published his descriptions of the Louisiana country in France in 1683.
Not until 1818 was any move made to settle Hannibal. In that year Abraham Bird was granted the area around Bear Creek in exchange for land he had lost at New Xladrid, Missouri, during earthquakes that in 1811 and 1812 shook the bed of the Xl ississippi. By 1827 five families had located there: by 1830 there were "thirty souls." trigger-alert for Indians. Nine years later the Clemenses arrived.
Originally settlers were drawn to Hannibal by a lumber boom. Later came the flour mills, the slaughter houses, and distilleries, then the railroad yards. The Burlington Line's freight repair yards are still in business. Other major industries are a branch of the International Shoe Company, a planing mill, a drill tools factory, and a cement plant.
Farming is as important to Hannibal as its industries. In the rich soil surrounding it, corn, soybeans, oats, wheat, and dairying supply a living for the farmers who trade in the town. Prosperity shows in the total deposits of $18.500.000 in its three banks.
The roster of Hannibal businesses pointedly indicates the citizen who brought it world fame. Shop signs tell of the Mark Twain Printers, Mark Twain Jewelry Co., Mark Twain Rest Home, Xlark Twain Cleaning Co., and Mark Twain Confectionery. Other establishments bearing the famous name are a dinette, gift shop. hotel, insulation company, produce company, supply company, and a taxi company. There are also the Tom Sawyer Theatre and the Huck Finn Burger Bar.
The Xlark Twain :\lemorial Bridge across the Mississippi, completed in 1935 at a cost of $1,000,000, is the entrance to the town on U. S. Highway 36, the entrance that nowrather than the Mississippi-is the town's link with the Nation,
River Trade Is Incidental Now
The very speed of the towboats that pass under the bridge, with its necklace of lights at night. has isolated Hannibal from the growing river trade. When Mark Twain was a pilot on the Xlississippi, a steamboat made 10 round trips a year between St. Louis and ~ ew Orleans. Today a towboat makes a round trip every 10 days. Diesel power enables them to make long-distance nonstop hauls, and they are not compelled to put in at small ports like Hannibal.
Nor are river hazards the same. In a stretch of the river within sight of one farmer's home, 29 steamboats were lost. Today the Mississippi between Baton Rouge and St. Paul has a navigable channel with a minimum depth of nine feet. Twenty-six dams with their accompanying locks ensure dependable navigation on the upper Mississippi. And the safety work goes on.*
Another hazard vanished through the progress of engine design. Steamboat boilers, overstrained for speed, often blew up. Mark Twain's younger brother Henry died as a result of steam burns when the Pennsylvania, on which he was the 20-year-old "mud clerk," or apprentice purser, exploded in 1858.
Henry is buried in Hannibal, as are Jane and John Xlarshall Clemens, Mark Twain's mother and father, and his brother Orion. Four small headstones mark their graves. Mark Twain died in his home in Connecticut in 1910 at the age of 74. He is buried beside his wife and three children at Elmira, New York.
A giant bronze statue of the writer in his later years stands in Hannibal's Riverview Park, overlooking the l\1ississippi from a height of 200 feet (opposite), The work of Frederick Hibbard, it was the 1913 gift of the State of Missouri and bears the inscription: "His religion was humanity and a whole world mourned for him when he died,"
Riverview Park of some 250 acres is also a gift to the town, A woodland Mark Twain knew as a boy, it was presented by the W, B, Pettibone family and is maintained by them. Its shrubs, lawns, and native trees make it one of the most beautiful parks in the United States, Like other sights connected with Mark Twain's life in Hannibal, with the single exception of the cave, it is open to everyone without charge, Hannibal has not attempted to profit from his fame, The town owns many of its historic buildings and maintains them at taxpayers' cost.
Gifts that help support a project large for a town of this size have come mainly from Hannibal people. Much of the work is done by volunteers. The city pays only two fulltime salaries, those of the custodians at the :.\lark Twain home and museum. All members of the Xlark Twain Municipal Board serve without pay,
One of the custodians of the boyhood home was born in Hannibal and, like so many you meet there, has some connection with the author. She is Mrs. Cyrus Anderson (page 123), Her grandfather, Will Pitts. was a playmate of Mark Twain and wrestled with him at the town pump. Dr. John Canella, one of Hannibal's physicians, is a grandson of the storekeeper who sold l\lark Twain his strong cigars, those pungent, cheap, "long nines."
Throngs of Visitors Surprise Residents
Parents like these, raising their children in the outdoor freedom that bears Tom Sawyer's stamp. are somewhat amazed by the unceasing crowds that come to their small town, a town not advertised nor publicized,
"People come here from every place you can think of," says John Winkler, chairman of the Mark Twain Xl unicipal Board, "This past year, 1955, we had a terribly hot summer and only 127,000 came. It was the same in 1954, when we had 134,000, But in the fine weather of 1953 there were 143,000,"
A building older in appearance than any in Hannibal is Mark Twain's birthplace at Florida, Missouri, 25 miles to the southwest. Florida holds but a handful of houses now and in size is little different from the wilderness crossing to which John Xl ar shall Clemens brought his family. An unsuccessful lawyer in Tennessee, he had come by horse and carriage and steamboat to Missouri, arriving with his wife and four children only six months before his famous son was born on November 30, 1835.
One of seven children, Mark Twain was a weak baby whom neighbors did not expect to live. Premature, he arrived when Halley's comet was in the sky and died when it reappeared 74 years later.
The two-room cabin with its two adults and four children was already crowded when Mark Twain was born. But before the Clemenses moved to Hannibal, another son, Henry. was born and their daughter Margaret died.
Today sparrows nest in the broken timbers of the frayed cabin. and field mice inhabit its many holes. It stands alone in the :\Iark Twain State Park outside Florida. Custodian John Schmidt, who lives down the road, gives visitors the key.
The two whitewashed rooms are barely furnished with odd itemsa handless clock. a spinning wheel. a bellows organ, and a bed-that never belonged to the Clemens family. Their furniture was sold for debt during the Judge's unprosperous days in Hannibal.
Back in Hannibal, where the Mississippi is still the truant's highway, I joined a family going fishing. The youngest with a rod and reel was barely three, but everybody's hopes were high-as high as those of Huck Finn who, fishing off Jackson's Island with a skinned rabbit for bait, caught a catfish as big as a man, It was six-foot-two and weighed 200 pounds-"as big a fish as was ever catched in the Mississippi, I reckon,"
Today's fish are a little smaller than that, though the yarns have not noticeably shrunk, A fair-sized catfish caught off Jackson's Island by anybody but Huck Finn weighs 30 pounds and is three-feet-four-as big as a boy, The world's record blue cat taken by rod and reel weighed 94 pounds, 8 ounces, But a fish that can growl, hum, or mew and travel across damp ground-as scientists say some species of catfish can do-lends itself to such tales as Mark Twain's, tales that linger still in the town he knew.
For, almost more than any other, Hannibal is suited to "the contemplative man's recreation," and its anglers still sound like the boy who 70 years ago meandered through the pages of Huckleberry Finn.
"We catched fish and talked, and we took a swim now and then to keep off sleepiness. It was kind of solemn, drifting down the big, still river, laying on our backs looking up at the stars, and we didn't ever feel like talking loud, and it warn't often that we laughed ... "
Town Still a Paradise for Boys
On any fair day in this Izaak Walton town worms wiggle on hooks that hang in creeks. in branches, and in the big, still river itself. And the talk that is heard isn't loud.
In every country where Mark Twain is read -a circle of books that stretches around the globe-Hannibal is known in its dress of fiction under the many names its author gave it. Yet it was just a village on the Mississippi like many others until Mark Twain made it known as a paradise for boys. Today it is that still.
Source: National Geographic, July, 1956
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