The Boyhood Home and the Museum of a Town

When Mark Twain died in April of nineteen ten, Hannibal had already been building a tourism identity around his memory for decades. The boyhood home on Hill Street had been purchased by the city and opened to the public as a museum in nineteen twelve, two years after his death. In nineteen sixty two the property was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Today the museum campus includes the restored boyhood home, the home of Laura Hawkins across the street where Becky Thatcher supposedly lived, the Justice of the Peace office once used by Twain's father, and a gallery where Twain's manuscripts and letters are displayed. There is something both inevitable and slightly complicated about a town that derives most of its public identity from one person. Twain himself was genuinely ambivalent about Hannibal.

He left at seventeen and rarely returned. He wrote about the place with enormous affection and with a novelist's clear awareness of its darkness. Huckleberry Finn, for all its comedy, ends with Huck announcing he is going to light out for the Territory to escape being civilized, to avoid getting absorbed by the respectable world.

The town that built a museum to Tom Sawyer is celebrating the boy who returned and fit in. The more interesting character in both books is the one who refused. What Hannibal gave Mark Twain was a complete world to draw from, small enough to know in its entirety, complicated enough to fuel a lifetime of writing.

He spent fourteen years here. He spent the rest of his life explaining what he had seen.