Mark Twain Country & Little Dixie
Clemens's Hannibal and Jim's Journey, the Little Dixie farm counties, the 1861 fight at Athens, the Illinois town of 1673 and Kirksville's osteopathy museum.
Northeast Missouri divides into the river and the interior. On the Mississippi, Hannibal keeps the Hill Street house where Samuel Clemens grew up and, a few blocks away, Jim's Journey, the museum of the Black town he grew up beside. Inland, the Salt River is dammed into Mark Twain Lake beside his birthplace at Florida. Many of the settlers of these farm counties, the ones called Little Dixie, came from the upper South and brought slavery with them. Clemens's uncle John Quarles kept about thirty enslaved people on his farm near Florida raising flax, grain and hemp, among them Daniel Quarles, the man Clemens named as his model for Jim.
The Civil War here set neighbour against neighbour. At Athens on the Des Moines River in August 1861 Union volunteers held off a pro-Southern force about four times their size, and in 1862 Union commanders executed prisoners at Kirksville and Palmyra. Kirksville is better known for Andrew Taylor Still, who opened the first school of osteopathy there in 1892.
Before any of this, the Des Moines River corner was Illinois country. In 1673 Marquette and Jolliet found a town of perhaps 8,000 Peoria and Moingwena people on a terrace above the river, now Iliniwek Village State Historic Site; their descendants are the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. The Sauk and Meskwaki later had a village at Athens.
What to See in Mark Twain Country & Little Dixie
7 places across the region, grouped by what they are.
Natural Areas
Historic Sites
Towns & Gateways
Architecture
Scenic Drives through Mark Twain Country & Little Dixie
Stories from Mark Twain Country & Little Dixie
Mark Twain Country & Little Dixie rewards the unhurried. Pick a base, fan out, and let the country between the headline stops surprise you.
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