Mark Twain's Home

Part of the purpose for my grant this summer was to visit Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain. Springfield's curriculum for 7th grade requires us to read Tom Sawyer. Since I will either be teaching that or excerpts from Huck Finn, I wanted to visit the place where it all started, to bring back some interesting artifacts for my students.

I met up with my friend Tanya (a friend from high school who now lives in Madison, Wisconsin), and we drove down to Hannibal together. Tanya is also an English teacher (although she teaches college), so visiting the home of a famous author was the prefect nerdy English teacher trip for us.

The Hannibal website makes it look like there is enough to keep you busy for days in that town. Lucky for us, we planned to do some more exploration north along the Mississippi River, so we only allotted one full day for Mark Twain's boyhood town.

The main thing I noticed about Hannibal is that it almost seemed like a ghost town. We arrived on a Sunday afternoon, and the streets were nearly empty--of cars and people. The next day wasn't much better. Apparently Hannibal doesn't have much going on aside from its Mark Twain fame, and I guess that doesn't really draw huge crowds of tourists. In fact, the biggest crowd we saw all day was in the coffee shop where we were taking a break after touring the museum. While we were there, several reporters and politicians arrived for a press conference with one of the candidates for Lt. Governor of Missouri.

We saw all of Hannibal's major sites: the museum, the Tom Sawyer fence, Tom Sawyer's hill, and the Tom Sawyer cave by lunch time. After lunch we took a cruise on a riverboat to see the Mississippi River from another angle. A little more luxurious than Huck Finn's raft, but the view was probably comparable.

After spending the day in Hannibal, I can honestly say, I understand why Huck Finn had to get on that raft and escape town (I mean in addition to the fact that he had an abusive father and he didn't want to be civilized by the Widow). There was nothing else to do but escape! No wonder Tom Sawyer had such a wild imagination, if he couldn't invent anything to do, he would have been bored to tears in Hannibal. Now, I will admit that the town may have been a bit more exciting in Mark Twain's days, but I hardly saw any local kids the whole time I was there.

By the end of the day in Hannibal, I had collected several pictures, a couple of postcards (to send to my students) and a couple of books to add to my classroom library. Hopefully I will be able to use some of this to make our studies of Mark Twain more interesting this year!