23 minute read
Mark Twain, From Hannibal to Hartford
I am not an American,” Mark Twain once said. “I am the American.”
Indeed, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was witness to much of the development of the United States.
He lived and worked on the Mississippi River during the heyday of the great steamships. He traveled west first by stagecoach, then aboard the great “Iron Horse.” He witnessed the Civil War, the abolishment of slavery, the Gold Rush, and the move into the industrialization age.
He was an adventurer – first down the Mississippi to New Orleans, then to California and even the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) – with several trips to Europe.
Not only did he witness the trials and tribulations of a developing nation, but he chronicled it, first in newspapers, then in periodicals, then in books.
Even his own saga was one of boom and bust, riches and bankruptcy, great loves, and devastating losses. Through all of his ups and downs in life, Sam Clemens turned to humor.
This year, I visited the two cities where Clemens lived the longest stretches of his life – his boyhood home in the Mississippi port town of Hannibal, Missouri, and the upscale city of Hartford, Connecticut, home to many publishing houses and a literary society in his chosen neighborhood of “Nook Farm.”
I recommend both destinations for your future travels. Both provide a fascinating window into a pivotal period of our country’s history, recounted by one of the greatest storytellers of all time… Mark Twain.
Hannibal – in the 1840s
In 1803, the United States made its famous Louisiana Purchase, paying France $15 million for 828,000 acres of land west of the Mississippi. Over the next two decades, many Americans, including John Clemens, a native of Tennessee, felt the lure of settling in riverboat towns.
John Clemens was trying, and failing, to run a general store in Florida, Missouri, some fifty miles east of Hannibal. He and his wife Jane and their six surviving children (a daughter had recently died) moved to Hannibal in 1839, when Samuel, the sixth of the seven children, had just turned four. John built a house on a piece of land that his cousin purchased.
That home is now fully restored and is the cornerstone of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum.
Here, Sam lived the rough-and-tumble life of a typical American boy in the 1840s, fishing, swimming, and exploring the area. He explored a cave two miles out of town (McDougal’s Cave became McDowell’s Cave in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) and canoeing to and exploring Glasscock’s Island, one of three on the Mississippi River at Hannibal, which became Jackson’s Island in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Sam also visited his uncle John Quarle’s farm in nearby Florida, Mo. There he listened to stories told by one of Quarle’s many slaves, Uncle Daniel, who became, in part, a model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn.
When Sam was 12 years old, his father died, and Sam left school to work as a printer’s apprentice for room and board. When he was 15, his oldest brother, Orion, bought the Hannibal Journal newspaper. In a tough economy, Orion and Sam moved the printing equipment into the family home, where they ran the paper, with Sam setting most of the type. As he painstakingly set type, Sam was able to read the news of the world and gradually developed a knack for his own writing, sometimes contributing light, satirical articles. Alas, the newspaper failed after two years.
So, at 17, Sam left home and traveled to New York, where he worked for a publishing house. He also worked for printers in Philadelphia and St. Louis, and then joined Orion again as printers in Keokuk, Iowa, where Sam also contributed five comic travel letters to the Keokuk Daily Post. Ever on the move, Sam quit the Iowa job, and moved on to Cincinnati, again working as a printer,
then set his sights on South America. All in all, by the time he was 20, Sam Clemens had developed a proficiency in printing and, although he may not have known it at the time, his own writing ability. I can’t help but think of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” theory presented in his book Outliers, which argues that so-called “natural ability” often requires a huge investment of time, say 10,000 hours, to create success. Gladwell cites Bill Gates’ fortunate circumstance of attending a high school that invested in computer technology and the Beatles playing eight-hour gigs over the course of three years in Hamburg before their “breakthrough” worldwide success. Sam Clemens’ unorthodox education included far more than 10,000 hours of newspapering!
Hannibal Today
Today, Hannibal, Missouri, is a delightful town that celebrates its most famous son’s heritage and legacy with tours, lectures, and special events throughout the year.
The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum opened to the public in 1912. One of America’s earliest historic houses, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is designated a National Historic Monument. The house was fully restored and stabilized in 1991. The restoration included rebuilding two rooms at the back of the house that had been removed in 1885.
Twain didn’t write his masterpieces (Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn) until two decades had passed and he was living in Hartford. But he drew on his childhood memories, casting many of his fictional characters on real-life persons. The Elijah Hawkins home has been restored and is part of the Mark Twain House complex; Twain identified the Hawkins’ daughter, Laura, as his model for Becky Thatcher. So, too, the “Huck Finn home” was the actual residence of Tom Blankenship, Twain’s model for Huck, which has been recreated with the help of historic photographs.
Newly restored is Grant’s Drug Store, also known as the Pilaster house, where Dr. Orville Grant had a medical office and drug store on the first floor and lived with his wife and her mother on the second. In late 1846 John Clemens went bankrupt and had to move his family out of their home across the street. The Grants accepted the Clemens family into their second-floor living quarters, where they shared the space. It was also where John Clemens died a few months later after he was caught in a sleet storm and developed pneumonia.
A couple of blocks down Main Street, I toured the Mark Twain Museum. This two-story museum houses several three-dimensional exhibits that bring to life Sam’s boyhood adventures. There’s a raft on the Mississippi and an entrance to local caves. A special permanent exhibit features the original illustrations by Norman Rockwell, both color and black-and-white studies of scenes from the Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn novels. Already famous for his Saturday Evening Post covers, Rockwell had been chosen in 1935 to illustrate the two beloved classics.
The artist began by reading the books and making notes of “must-include” scenes, like whitewashing Aunt Polly’s fence. He then traveled to Hannibal to get authentic details. While there, he visited the famous Mark Twain Cave, where a guide took him inside and left him alone to sketch. “I discovered that all the other illustrators had been wrong,” Rockwell recounted. “They’d painted the cave with stalactites hanging from the roof and sides. It wasn’t like that at all. The rocks were all horizontal, jutting edges piled on top of the other.”
The edition of Tom Sawyer with Rockwell’s illustration appeared in 1936; Huck Finn in 1940. Rockwell gave the illustrations to the museum upon his death in 1978. I’m happy to say I purchased a two-volume commemorative edition in the museum gift shop!
Beyond the museum, there is much to see and do in Hannibal – you should probably stay at least two nights to fit it all in. I didn’t allow enough time for shopping in Downtown Hannibal, and there are several unique boutiques along its historic Main Street, with many of the buildings housed in fully restored buildings of Victorian and Gothic Revival architecture.
Hannibal is also becoming known as a “City of Murals,” and there are close to thirty artworks on buildings, most in the downtown historic district, that capture the city’s history and personages. Art continues as a focus along Main Street, with several local galleries and lightpole banners that capture many of Mark Twain’s witticisms.
The Hannibal History Museum is a recommended stop. It tells the stories of several lesser-known town residents, among them, native daughter Margaret Tobin, later known as the Titanic’s Unsinkable Molly Brown, and Adm. Robert Edward Coontz, who commanded ships during the Spanish-American War and World War I, later serving as Governor of Guam, Chief of Naval Operations and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Fleet. Then there was William Lear, famous for developing the first mass-produced business jet, known as the Lear Jet, in 1963. Singer Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards will always be remembered as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in Pinocchio and his famous song, “When You Wish Upon a Star.”
Steamboating on the Mississippi
In his early twenties, Sam took a steamboat trip down the Mississippi to New Orleans, with his goal being a trip to Brazil. But the steamboat ride itself inspired him to chart a new course – he aspired to become a riverboat captain. Soon he signed on to be a pilot’s apprentice. In 1858, at age 23, he became a riverboat pilot.
The life of a steamboat pilot also led to his later adoption of the pen name “Mark Twain.” Mark and twain are two sweet words for a Mississippi riverboat pilot, meaning two fathoms deep, allowing safe passage for a steamship through dangerous waters.
Clemens likely would have remained a riverboat captain for years had it not been for two events. The first, in June of 1858, was the death of his younger brother Henry, who served as a “mud clerk” (purser’s assistant) on the steamer Pennsylvania. When a boiler exploded, Henry was fatally scalded and lingered for seven agonizing days. It was Sam who had encouraged Henry’s apprenticeship, and he blamed himself for his brother’s death.
The year 1861 marked the beginning of the Civil War, and all steamboat activity halted, although Clemens was concerned that the Union Army would draft him into service as a gunrunner. Missouri was a southern state, and Sam Clemens’ views of slavery were as yet unformed. When the Missouri governor called for volunteers, Sam joined a ragtag group of 12 in his home county of Marion. But after two weeks of slogging about the area in the rain and arguing about whose job it was to feed the mule, the command structure fell apart. Sam had had enough.
Meanwhile, Sam’s older brother Orion had come to the conclusion that slavery was wrong and had worked for the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln. In part due to his allegiance to and work on behalf of Lincoln, Orion was appointed Secretary of the new government of the Territory of Nevada. Sam was now 25 and traveled with Orion by stagecoach to the silver-mining city of Virginia City. Twain’s attempts at mining failed, and he then became a reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Gazette, the largest newspaper between St. Louis and San Francisco. In February 1863, he began using the pen name Mark Twain.
Over the next few years, Twain wrote for the San Francisco Call and Sacramento Union, the latter paper funding his trip to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). His dispatches to the newspaper became the basis of his first lectures.
He also achieved national notoriety when he wrote a short story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” That brought him to the attention of the New York Tribune, which partially funded his trip to Europe and the Middle East in 1867, which later became the foundation for his book, “The Innocents Aboard.”
More importantly, on the Atlantic crossing, he met fellow passenger Charles Langdon who shared a photo of his sister, Olivia. Twain claimed it was love at first sight.
He met Olivia, whom he called “Livy,” the next year in New York while visiting Charles; together with her family, they took in a lecture by Charles Dickens. Over the next two years, Clemens courted Olivia, mostly through correspondence while he was on the lecture circuit. Clemens assured her that he had given up smoking, drinking, and cursing. He also worked to secure the permission and blessings of her parents, the wealthy Jervis and Olivia Lewis Langdon of Elmira, New York. Olivia turned her suitor down three times before saying yes. Clemens was also ultimately successful in securing her parents’ blessing, with Jervis providing a loan to allow his future son-in-law to buy into the Buffalo Express newspaper. And much to his surprise, after the couple wed in 1870 and made their way to Buffalo, the Langdons surprised the newlyweds with a beautiful fully staffed and furnished home in one of the city’s finest neighborhoods.
Hartford – The Happy Years
A year after their marriage, and with Mark Twain at the top of his game as a writer and lecturer, the couple decided to move to Hartford. It was the center of the publishing world, and a literary community, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, had sprung up on the northern hillside called “Nook Farm.” That’s where the Clemens decided to build their dream home, engaging New York architect Edward Tuckerman Potter.
They also engaged Louis C. Tiffany and his Associated Artists to decorate the walls and ceilings of the home’s public spaces, particularly the enlarged entry hall. Associated Artists’ four designers — Tiffany, Candace Wheeler, Lockwood DeForest, and Samuel Coleman — were members of the Aesthetic movement and were known for exotic interiors. Each brought ideas from different parts of the world where they had traveled and studied. Thus, the first floor of the house includes design motifs from Morocco, Japan, India, China, and Turkey. These features include intricate geometric stenciling on walls and doors, specialty wallpapers, some of which seem to shimmer, pierced brass work, and carved teak woodwork.
Tours of the house assemble in the adjoining museum and I recommend you tour the museum first. Begin by watching the excellent 17-minute documentary on Twain’s life by Ken Burns.
We then walked over to the house, our guide noting its broad porch that wraps around the 11,500 square-foot home of American High Gothic style.
The entry foyer features dark-paneled walls and a unique split-flu fireplace. While I describe it below, please know that photos are not permitted inside the house. I’ve toured the house twice, including my first visit in 2007 and again last summer. Much has changed over the last 18 years as preservation work has continued, and more and more Twain artifacts have been located and returned to the house.
A large central staircase has surprisingly lower banister railings. Our tour guide said this design choice allowed the house to appear larger, and indeed the staircase seems to ascend more than its three stories.
The house was outfitted with the most advanced technological equipment of the day, including a telephone, speaking tubes and bells, a burglar alarm, gas lighting, central heating, and extensive plumbing.
The Clemens enjoyed many happy years with their daughters Suzy, Clara, and Jean at their Hartford Home. (Their only son and first-born child, Langdon, was born prematurely and died at just 19 months of diphtheria in 1872.)
In the first-floor library, with its glassed-in conservatory backdrop, the children often performed plays, and Sam would read excerpts from his new works and recite poetry. The fireplace’s large oak mantel is the focal point of the room, which the Clemens purchased from a castle in Scotland. Sam added a brass smoke shield with the inscription “The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it,” a quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The library’s mantel was always bedecked with a number of accessories. Twain would spin tales that would include all the accouterments in order, beginning with the bauble on the left and finishing with the last on the right.
Sam Clemens loved to entertain, and parties often went well into the night! The dining room and third-floor billiard room were sites of frequent personalities of the day, including literary figures William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and Bret Harte; actor Edwin Booth; and British explorer and journalist Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
Clemens had originally planned to write in the library but found he was easily distracted there. Instead, the billiard room became his private domain. Although equipped with a large formal and elaborately carved desk that looked out toward the billiard table, Clemens preferred to write at a smaller corner desk, which removed distractions. He would often fan out his pages on the billiard table for editing.
But much of Clemens’ writing was also done on summer vacations at his sisterin-law’s home, Quarry Farm, in Elmira. In 1874, Susan and Theodore Crane surprised their brother-in-law with an octagonal gazebo-style study they had built about 100 yards from the main house and overlooking the Chemung River Valley. It was moved in 1952 onto the campus of Elmira University, Olivia Clemens’ alma mater.
Clemens’ later years were fraught with financial problems and personal losses. As a printer who had handset typed throughout his early years, he decided to invest in a typesetting machine, The Paige Compositor. The machine proved unreliable, hugely expensive, and gradually rendered obsolete with the invention of the Linotype. Meanwhile, Clemens had invested nearly $300,000 from 1880 to 1894 in the failed enterprise, including all his book profits and some of his wife’s inheritance. He and Livy shut down the Hartford house and moved to Europe, where Clemens went back on the speaking circuit.
With the guidance of a friend, financier Henry Huttleson Rogers of Standard Oil, Clemens was able to pay back all his creditors.
Clemens passed through a deep depression when his daughter Suzy died in 1896 of meningitis. Olivia died in 1904, and Jean died in 1909. His close friend Henry Rogers also died suddenly in 1909.
Clemens lived out his final years first in Manhattan and then at Stormfield, a home he had built in 1906 in Redding, Connecticut. (He could not bring himself to go back to his Hartford home following the death of Suzy.)
Mark Twain was born two weeks after Halley’s Comet made its closest approach to Earth in 1835. In 1909, Twain said: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, and they must go out together.”
Twain’s prediction proved accurate: he died at Stormfield of a heart attack on April 10, 1910, a month before the comet passed Earth.
A remarkable friendship
One of the most pleasurable aspects of travel I find is that it brings history to life. It’s exceptionally interesting to me to discover how figures of history – that I often learned about in school and who seemed at the time somehow suspended in space – intersected with other persons of prominence and historical significance.
A related note: I love museum gift shops, which often have the most intriguing books on their respective subject matter. I was enthralled with Grant and Twain: The Story of an American Friendship, which I picked up at the Mark Twain Museum store in Hartford.
Grant and Twain – or should I say “the two Sams” – had much in common! Both were adoring husbands and doting fathers. And sadly, both had invested in enterprises that led them into bankruptcy, and they fought their way back into financial solvency.
The two Sams? Of course, we all know that Mark Twain was really Sam Clemens. Grant’s nomenclature is a bit more complicated. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant. But when Ulysses’ father asked Congressional Representative Thomas L. Hamer to recommend his son to the U. S Military Academy West Point, Hamer could not precisely remember the lad’s name, so he inserted Ulysses as the first name and assigned the middle initial “S” for Simpson, referencing Ulysses’ mother’s maiden name. At West Point, his classmates dubbed Ulysses “Sam” for the “S” –and he was Sam from that point on to many of his lifelong friends, but never to Mark Twain, who, out of respect, always called him General Grant.
Although they had met earlier, it was a period of 15 months that began with Grant’s bankruptcy in May 1884 until the former general and president’s death in July 1985, when Grant and Clemens became the best of friends. Clemens was at the height of his career and had established his own publishing company, which also published Grant’s Personal Memoirs, a two-volume set that covered his youth, education, and every battle he fought in during the Civil War. Grant had almost signed with another publisher for a flat fee of $20,000. But Clemens, through his knowledge of subscriptions and the intrinsic value that Grant brought to the table, promised more than double that.
The choice of publisher was a crucial decision for Grant: he had developed cancer of the throat and tongue, a painful and fatal disease in the 1800s, and, knowing that his death was imminent, he wanted to provide for his wife, Julia, and children. Helped along with cocaine dosages from his doctors, Grant willed himself to write for sometimes four and five hours a day. Many thought the book kept him alive. Grant died four days after submitting his final draft of Volume Two on July 23, 1885.
Clemens published Grant’s Personal Memoirs on Dec. 10, 1885. On Feb. 27 of the following year, Clemens presented Julia Grant with a check for $200,000. It was, at the time, the largest payment made in U.S. publishing history. He continued to present royalty checks to Julia, which ultimately totaled $450,000.
Mark Twain’s masterpiece, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published in the United States on Feb. 18, 1885. In lieu of a dedication, Twain included this preface, submitted well after the manuscript was completed:
NOTICE
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR Per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
Twain never revealed the riddle of the passage. But it had to be his friend, General Grant.
IF YOU GO…
HANNIBAL, MISSOURI
Hannibal Convention & Visitors Bureau
Not only does the CVB’s website have recommendations for accommodations and dining, it also has a handy guide to the city’s murals. (573) 221-2477
Recommended Hotels
The Belvedere Inn
An exquisitely restored 1859 Italianate mansion
521 Bird Street, Hannibal
www.belvedereinnhannibal.com
Best Western on the River
401 No. 3rd Street, Hannibal
Includes indoor and outdoor pools and indoor spa
www.bestwestern.com
Attractions and Tours
Mark Twain Riverboat
One hour site-seeing and two-hour dinner cruises.
www.marktwainriverboat.com
Hannibal History Museum/Haunted Hannibal Ghost Tours
www.hannibalhistorymuseum.com
Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum
120 N. Main Street (Home)
415 N. Main Street (Museum) www.markttwainmuseum.com
Mark Twain Cave Complex
www.marktwaincave.com
Mark Twain Memorial Lighthouse
www.hannibalparks.org
Riverview Park
465 acres of forested land offering scenic views of the Mississippi River. www.hannibalparks.org
Restaurants
The Brick Oven
Wood-fired pizza and Italian cuisine. www.thebrickoven.t2-food.com
Java Jive
Coffee shop, bakery, ice cream parlor and gift shop
www.javajive.coffee
Mark Twain Dinette
The dinette is next to the Mark Twain Boyhood home. Famous for its MadeRite frosty mugs of root beer.
www.marktwaindinette.com
Cave Hollow West Winery
www.cavehollow.westwinery.com
Festivals
Second Saturday Gallery Walk,
Monthly, year-round, 4 – 7 p.m.
National Tom Sawyer Days
From frog jumping and fence painting to beautiful baby pageants, this spirited festival takes place over five days surrounding the 4th of July.
www.hannibaljaycees.org
Hannibal Folklife Festival
Each October (dates change), this festival showcases traditional craftsman, artisans, artists, food, music and performers. www.hannibalarts.com
Victorian Festival of Christmas
From the day after Thanksgiving through Dec. 24 each year, Hannibal’s downtown is alive with music, carriage rides, a mustache contest and a festival of decorated trees.
www.historichannibalmo.com
HARTFORD, CONNECTICUT
Connecticut State Visitor Office
CT VISIT
www.ctvisit.com>rivervalleyandgreaterh artford
Recommended Hotels
The Goodwin Hotel
Situated in Downtown Hartford since 1881.
www.goodwinhartford.com
The Mayflower Hotel and Spa/Auberge Collection
Located about an hour outside of Hartford in Washington, Connecticut, this boutique inn was once visited by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the writer-creator of the TV series, Gilmore Girls (now on Netflix). The Mayflower is said to be the inspiration for the series’ Independence Inn, and the town of Washington and nearby New Milford, the inspiration for its quaint setting of Stars Hollow. www.aubergeresorts.com/mayflower
Restaurants
Black-eyed Sally’s Southern Kitchen and Bar Hip, vibrant roadhouse with live music most nights
www.blackeyedsallys.com
Millwright’s Restaurant
This multi-award-winning restaurant under the direction of famed chef Tyler Anderson (Top Chef, Chopped), is located just north of Hartford in Simsbury. Worth the drive; save room for dessert. www.millwrightsrestaurant.com
The Charles
In the Hartford suburb of Wethersfield, this restaurant won rave reviews in Hartford Magazine’s 2023 Best of Connecticut awards. www.thecharlesct.com
Attractions and Tours
Mark Twain House and Museum
www.marktwainhouse.org
Harriett Beecher Stowe Center
The Center includes the Stowe House (1871), a National Historic Landmark; the Katharine Seymour Day House (1884), and Victorian grounds and gardens. 77 Forest Street, Hartford www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org
The Connecticut State Capitol
Guided tours are offered weekday mornings, 15 minutes after the hour. Opened in January 1879, the Capitol, built in Gothic Revival style, overlooks Hartford’s 41-acre Bushnell Park.
www.cga.ct.gov
