Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum

Samuel Clemens lived in the house on Hill Street from 1844 to 1853, and Hannibal has spent more than a century arranging itself around the books he made of those years. The house was bought, repaired and given to the city in 1911 and opened as a museum in 1912. In 1926 the Tom and Huck statue went up at the foot of Cardiff Hill, one of the earliest statues anywhere raised to fictional characters. The house became a National Historic Landmark in 1962, with a whitewashed fence beside it for the scene every visitor knows.

The museum now runs nine properties on Hill and Main streets. Among them are the house of Laura Hawkins, the girl Clemens drew on for Becky Thatcher, reopened inside in 2016, and the office where his father, John Marshall Clemens, served as justice of the peace. A rebuilt Huck Finn House, finished in 2006, stands for the home of Tom Blankenship, the town boy behind Huck, and its exhibits take up Hannibal's history of slavery. The Museum Gallery on Main Street holds first editions, Clemens's Oxford gown, the only known surviving white suit coat, and original Norman Rockwell paintings made for editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the second largest collection of Rockwell originals anywhere.

The Mississippi runs a block east. Every Fourth of July the town holds National Tom Sawyer Days, with fence whitewashing and frog jumping. Jim's Journey, a few blocks north, tells the story of the Black Hannibal these houses only begin to describe.