Jim's Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center

Until this museum opened in 2013, the only memorial in Hannibal that mentioned Jim was a 1934 historical marker that put a racial slur in his name, and it disappeared in the late 1980s. Jim's Journey, the town's first African American history museum, starts from the man Clemens himself named as Jim's model. In his autobiography Clemens wrote of Uncle Dan'l, an enslaved man on his uncle John Quarles's farm near Florida, whom he had put in his books under his own name and as Jim.

The museum tells Daniel Quarles's own story. He was born enslaved in Caroline County, Virginia, in 1798, and when the Quarles household moved to Missouri in 1834 he walked while the family rode. On the farm, men raised flax, grain and hemp, and children worked from before sunrise to after sunset. His son Harvey was sold down the river. Although Daniel was freed on November 14, 1855, he and his wife Hannah stayed on in the quarters, and he left the farm only after the war. By 1878 he was in Hannibal with a new family; the museum thinks his children went to Douglasville School, the town's first public school for Black children, opened in 1870. He died around 1880. At the 2013 opening a descendant of Daniel and Hannah Quarles stood beside a descendant of Tom Blankenship, the boy behind Huck.

The rest of the museum follows Hannibal's Black churches, schools, businesses, lodges and soldiers through slavery and Jim Crow. It is small, and tours are by appointment.