My husband and I spent a wonderful day in Hannibal.  The townspeople were so friendly and helpful and seemed so proud to have Samuel Clemens as an honored son.  After grabbing iced coffees at Java Jive (a wonderfully atmospheric coffee house), we began exploring the shops and museums on Hannibal’s Main Street. The shops had quaint names like “Aunt Polly’s Treasures” and were filled with all types of Mark Twain paraphernalia, from typical souvenir mugs to scholastic books on Mark Twain.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home http://www.marktwainmuseum.org/ was our first museum stop.

The original home of Samuel Clemens has been carefully maintained and includes the bedroom of the young boy and the infamous window that like Tom Sawyer, he stole out of to meet up with friends like Tom Blankenship (the boy Huck was modeled after). Each room of the house has a white statue of Mark Twain, looming ghost-like from windows and corners. Beautiful closet dioramas reveal the lives of Samuel Clemens’ family members.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Across the street from the Clemens’ home is the Becky Thatcher house, the real life home of the girl she was modeled after, Laura Hawkins, Sam’s boyhood sweetheart. Every year during Tom Sawyer Days five seventh grade couples are selected to represent Tom and Becky throughout the following year. We were not able to attend, but I found this cute couple on the Facebook page for the contest.

Next to Becky’s house is the building housing the law offices of Sam Clemens’ father…you can peer in one window and see a dead body on the floor, of course it’s not the same one young Sam saw in the middle of the night. The story goes that he knew he would be in trouble for sneaking out of the house, so he thought he would spend the rest of the night sleeping on a cot in his father’s law office.  Feeling around he stumbled across the body of a man that his father was investigating in a murder case, but of course the boy didn’t know that and received a bad scare.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Behind the Mark Twain House is the Tom Blankenship house where the real Huckleberry Finn lived with his …. brothers and sisters. a small place for a large family. In his autobiography, Mark Twain said, “In ‘Huckleberry Finn’ I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was.  he was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.  His liberties were totally unrestricted.  He was the only really independent person–boy or man–in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us. We liked him; we enjoyed his society.  And as his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy’s” (p. 1884).

 

 

 

Further south on Main is the Mark Twain Museum featuring a life size raft, stage coach, and riverboat wheel. The most memorable exhibits in the museum for me were: a beautiful display with Twain and his characters, Mark Twain’s writing desk, the first editions of Twain’s works, and the fifteen paintings by Norman Rockwell for special printings of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which were presented to the museum by the artist. I was thrilled to find copies of these at one of the little souvenir stores that I can’t wait to put up in my classroom!