Mark Twain Overlook

From this bluff above the Mississippi, Mark Twain watched sunsets he never forgot. In the summer of eighteen fifty-five, before he was famous, a young Samuel Clemens lived briefly in Muscatine, working at the Muscatine Journal, a newspaper partly owned by his brother Orion. Years later Twain wrote that he had seen the sun set over many great rivers, but the sunsets here were the most beautiful he had ever known.

This overlook honors that memory, with his words carved into a marker. The spot has its own strange history too. It sits where Muscatine's first radio station, K T N T, broadcast from nineteen twenty-five to nineteen thirty-one, run by an eccentric promoter named Norman Baker, whose call letters stood for Know The Naked Truth.

River, writer, and radio all meet on this quiet bluff.