One of my favorite adventures during our recent visit to Missouri was our trip to Hannibal – home to both Mark Twain and the Unsinkable Molly Brown. I knew that Mark Twain, whose real name is Samuel Clemens, hailed from Hannibal. However, I have always associated Molly Brown with Denver Colorado. Margaret Tobin Brown was born in Hannibal and lived there until she was 18. She ended her days a very prosperous woman but she started her life in extreme poverty. By the age of thirteen, she had already dropped out of school to work as a tobacco leaf stripper at the local tobacco factory in Hannibal. Her childhood home is small and humble. It does have a great display of artifacts and newspaper articles related to her survival of the Titanic’s sinking. I especially enjoyed seeing the first, second and third class China dishes from the Titanic.
We started our morning at the Mark Twain Boyhood Home Museum where we bought tickets that included several buildings including Huckleberry Finn’s House, Becky Thatcher’s house and Grant’s pharmacy. Mark Twain’s real name was Samuel Clemens. In Twain’s day, it was fashionable for writers to take on a pen name. At one point, Clemens worked on steamships and Mark Twain was a nautical term for a safe river depth…literally two fathoms or 12 feet. In real life, Becky Thatcher was his lifelong friend Laura Hawkins. Huck Finn was based on his childhood friend Tom Blankenship.
While in Hannibal, we also took an hour-long cruise on the Mark Twain riverboat along the Mississippi. I read about it online and booked our tickets in advance. It was perfect for a quick overview of the Mississippi River and surrounding area. The crew was cheerful and the captain was really entertaining. The ship’s interior could have used a little freshening up in my opinion. We were fortunate enough to visit in the off season so the boat was not crowded. The only negative is that the Mississippi had a number of invasive silver and bighead carp floating dead on the surface. The extreme heat is causing low oxygen levels which, in turn, is killing the carp.
We then enjoyed a relaxing lunch in the local Irish pub followed by a quick trip to the local ice cream shop to try the local treat of huckleberry ice cream – delicious. It was in the mid 90s and very humid so the place was filled with people from one of two large cruise ships docked in Hannibal. According to one of the museum docents, Hannibal has a population of 18,000 but gets between 55,000 and 60,000 visitors per month. I can see why Hannibal is a popular destination. The town is a charming step back in time.
NO time for boredom today 