| Saturday morning, after grabbing a
couple of doughnuts and some coffee for the road at the St. Joseph
Drury Inn breakfast bar, it was a few hours drive from the western
border on the Missouri River side of the state to the Mississippi
River side and Hannibal, the boyhood home of Mark Twain. The house that once stood here (not this reconstruction) was believed to be the home of Tom Blankenship, named by Twain as a model for Huckleberry Finn. |
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| The white house was the boyhood home of young Samuel Clemens |  |
| Inside are a bunch of rooms with white statues of Twain and some quotes of his. |  |
| Like this one sitting at a dining room table. |  |
| I don't know if this was his bedroom or not, but since it is decorated as a boy's room and there is a figure of a boy looking out the window I think it might be. |  |
| This is the (recently refurbished) home of Laura Hawkins, the inspiration for Becky Thatcher. |  |
| Sam's father, John Marshall Clemens, was a Justice of the Peace in Hannibal. His office was across the street from his house. That sure makes the morning commute pretty easy. |  |
| A peek inside. |  |
| A statue of Tom and Huck. |  |
| The main drag of historic Hannibal, a block from the river. It's mostly shops and places tourists would visit. The rest of town where most people seem to live is to the west. |  |
| Just as Marceline is known for Walt, Independence was Harry's town and Clarinda produced baby Glenn, Hannibal is lousy with Mark Twain stuff. This was kind of a trip of great American icons. |  |
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| You have to have an old (style, at least) riverboat on the Mississippi. |  |
| I would like to congratulate Randy J on the honor of his knighthood. |  |
| Oh, how young Samuel Clemens and his friends used to love to go to this theatre to watch movies, or as they were known at the time, flickering moving images that have not been invented yet. |  |
| These historic buildings date to the first half of the 19th century. |  |
| The building on the left, built in the
1840's, was originally the McDaniels Candy Store. The store owner's
son was a friend of Sam's. The building on the right, the Pilaster House, was prefabricated in Cincinnati and assembled here in 1836. In 1846, because of financial problems, the Clemens family was forced to leave their home and moved in with the Grant family who lived upstairs over a drug store. J.M. Clemens died of pneumonia in one of the upstairs rooms. |
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| Like I say, you can't swing a dead cat in Hannibal without hitting something Mark Twainish. |  |
