There wasn’t a lot in Hannibal we wanted to see — Mark Twain’s boyhood home, of course, but it is one of the few touristy towns in the Midwest I’ve never been to, and it was on our way to Indiana, so we stopped.
We wanted to get out of the Lighthouse Inn as soon as possible so we drove downtown and ate a leisurely breakfast at a cafe/bookstore/gift shop called Java Jive. The food was good and the atmosphere was fun. We managed to be the first people in the door of the visitor center for the Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum. The museum consists of eight buildings—the interpretive center, Huck Finn’s house, Mark Twain’s house, a gift shop, Becky Thatcher’s house, a justice of the peace office where Clemen’s father worked, Grant’s Drugstore where Clemen’s, his mother, and his siblings lived after his father died, and a museum building.
They don’t have anywhere near enough artifacts or information to fill all those buildings. We hadn’t even finished reading the displays in the interpretive center when I noticed I was seeing the same information two or three times. The Huck Finn house is a reconstruction of the home of Tom Blankenship, Samuel Clemen’s boyhood friend and supposedly the inspiration for Huck Finn.
Clemen’s boyhood home is just filled with period artifacts and life-size statues of the adult Clemens in every room. The whitewashed fence from Tom Sawyer is on one side of the house and the gift shop is on the other.
Across the street is Becky Thatcher’s house, actually the girlhood home of Laura Hawkins who was a friend of Samuel Clemens. There was nothing inside this huge house except an interactive display for kids comparing the lifestyles of the Becky (well-off), Tom (middle class), Huck (poor) and Jim (slave).
The justice of the peace and Grant’s Drugstore are on the right in the street photo above. There was very little of interest in either of them except the Wheel of Misfortune, which we could spin to see how we were going to die. I actually managed a long and happy life. My wife died of typhoid, I think.
We stopped back at Java Jive for something to drink and a cinnamon roll, then did the museum building. The displays upstairs were actually interesting, although even here they didn’t come close to filling the room. There were artifacts from Clemen’s life, first editions of his books, photos of his family, and illustrations from his famous books done by Norman Rockwell.
We weren’t interested in the famous cave where Tom and Becky got lost—we’ve seen caves. We weren’t interested in Molly Brown’s birthplace—it was tiny and we’ve toured her house in Denver. We weren’t interested in Lover’s Leap—every town near a hill has one. My wife likes boat rides, so we opted for a hour-long trip on the Mississippi, on the Mark Twain Riverboat. It didn’t even pretend to have a sternwheel, just a tarp-covered cylinder at the back, and the engines were obviously diesel.
We found seats at the very front on the middle deck. We’d no sooner sat down than a guy pulled up a chair and began talking to us. He was from Kansas, on his way with his wife to Indiana to have their motorhome fixed after colliding with a deer. We learned this and a whole lot more — including his wife’s ailments and food preferences — when she joined us a short time later. Among other things, we learned that they had totally bought into the Lover’s Leap legend about the Indian maid and Indian brave who jumped to their deaths when her father forbade their marriage. But when the narrator on the boat told the story in a way that was deliberately and obviously nonsense, they kind of shut up and soon left our company. Maybe I’m being harsh. There probably aren’t a lot of places in Kansas where one can jump to one’s death.
The ride went upstream for about a quarter mile, then turned and went about two miles downstream, then back to Hannibal. There wasn’t much to see. I thought it was a little dull, but my wife found it relaxing. The most interesting thing for me was watching a working towboat stack barges in the channel to be picked up later by a bigger towboat and taken downstream.
Back on shore, we crossed the bridge visible in the photo above and headed into Illinois. We ended up at a Hampton Inn in Macomb. When we’d moved out of the state, there were still three counties I’d never been in, and Macomb was the county seat of one of them. I left my wife in our room overlooking lovely Illinois scenery while I did some unexciting birding at local parks.
When I got back, we had a boring, expensive supper at McAlister’s, then watched another lousy Loretta Young movie on TV.
