Mark Twain Cave: Sam Clemens's Name in the Rock
Near Hannibal, Missouri
About a mile south of downtown Hannibal, a cave opens into a hillside above the Mississippi flood plain. In Samuel Clemens's boyhood it was called McDowell's Cave, named for a Saint Louis physician named Joseph Nash McDowell, who reportedly stored a human body in alcohol inside the cave, claiming it was his daughter. Whether that story was true or an elaborate rumor, the cave's genuine labyrinth of passages made it a place of dread and fascination for the children of Hannibal.
In his novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, published in eighteen seventy six, Twain renamed it McDougal's Cave and used it as the setting for one of the story's most frightening episodes: Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher get lost inside for three days while Injun Joe hides deeper in the passages. The book made the cave famous. In eighteen eighty the cave was officially renamed Mark Twain Cave in honor of the author.
Tours of the cave have run continuously since eighteen eighty six, making it the oldest operating show cave in the state of Missouri. In the year two thousand nineteen, a remarkable discovery was made inside. A signature reading Sam Clemens was found carved into the cave wall.
Handwriting experts analyzed it against known samples of Clemens's handwriting from eighteen fifty three, the year he left Hannibal, and the analysis matched. The boy who would become Mark Twain had carved his name into the limestone, and it waited there for more than one hundred and fifty years to be identified.
