Read an Excerpt
Mark Twain's Homes Literary Tourism
By Hilary Iris Lowe
University of Missouri Press
Copyright © 2012 The Curators of the University of Missouri
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1976-3
Chapter One
The Many Birthplaces of Mark Twain
The house that we were born in is an inhabited house ... over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. It is a group of organic habits.
—Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space, 1958)
Samuel Clemens's birthplace in Florida, Missouri, has changed a great deal since the author's birth in 1835. Florida was never a bustling metropolis. In Clemens's day it had a population of one hundred, but as of the 2010 census, its population was gone. The town is now merely a crossing of three roads near the northern reaches of Mark Twain Lake—a place that is visited by more vacationers and speedboat fans than by Mark Twain devotees. Florida survived the 1984–1985 flooding of the Salt River Valley by the Army Corps of Engineers to make Mark Twain Lake, but only because what was left of the town sits on high ground. It is near this place that the state of Missouri has put forward one cabin, out of a multitude, which locals claimed to be the site of Samuel Clemens's birth. In 1960, the state's cabin was enclosed by a modern museum building that marks it as a shrine. However, the cabin that is kept there has always been the subject of controversy.
This is the story of this particular cabin and its claim to be Samuel Clemens's birthplace, and its history explains why the site's managers have not been able to create an interpretive narrative that successfully connects Clemens with the place of his origin. The history of this site reveals the same kind of questions that scholars have brought to bear on the fraught history of Abraham Lincoln's log-cabin birthplace, which like other historic sites, has recently been declared an "authentic replica," or in the National Park Service's most recent linguistic terminology, "symbolic birth cabin," rather than the actual birthplace of Lincoln. In addition, I look at Clemens's own thoughts on the preservation of birthplaces, the troubled history of the commemoration of birthplaces in the United States and the story of Samuel Clemens's many purported birthplaces in Florida, Missouri. The Missouri state park, which commemorates his birth, has a complicated history of its own that evolved between 1915 and 1960, and then stood still until today.
Mark Twain's actual birthplace may be impossible to track down. It likely no longer exists. There are conflicting accounts of what happened to the building where he was born. Some say the house was carried away piece by piece by relic seekers and Mark Twain fans sometime before 1905. Others say the house was whittled down into mementos and canes and distributed at any number of World's Fairs. If this is the case, then the house circulates out there in shards and fragments. Missouri's Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site ignores all of these accounts. But the history of the site brings up important questions: Why do birthplaces need to be remembered? What is it that they reveal about the origin of American character? Is there a story that site managers can tell with inauthentic birthplaces and false relics? And most important, do we need sites of origin—birthplaces—so much that they have to be fabricated? Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis and popular understandings of it have moved many, especially in the early twentieth century, to consider that there was a direct connection between place and character. The American celebration of birthplaces at places like Florida, Missouri, reveals the necessity for a meaningful national origin story. This site's history reveals the need for just that connection between place of origin and writer.
The Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site Today
If you visit the site of Mark Twain's birth in Florida, Missouri, you will find an empty field, a concrete pedestal that was once part of a monument, and a plaque put there by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. The pedestal is missing a bronze bust of Mark Twain, removed in 1964, and looks peculiar addressing an empty field. There is no building here. Although the plaque shows old photographs of Florida that reveal there once really was a town on this site, not much of that town remains.
There are a few buildings nearby, one a newly "restored" log-cabin structure on display about a hundred yards beyond the odd, bust-less Twain monument, and recent residences within sight. Not much is left of the little hamlet of sixty white families and enslaved peoples that—the plaque points out—lived here during the time when the Clemens family was here. Founded in 1831, Florida was established just ten years after the Missouri Compromise, allowing Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state. At that time, Missouri was the farthest western state where slaveholding families could relocate and bring with them the human property and way of life to which they had become accustomed. The Clemens and Lampton family, like many other white slaveholding families from Kentucky and Tennessee interested in new opportunities, immigrated to this area and set up new lives in Monroe County. Not long after Jane Lampton Clemens, Sam Clemens's mother, saw her favorite sister, Patsey Ann Lampton Quarles, immigrate to Missouri in 1934, the Clemens family followed.
When the Clemenses arrived, Florida was a city as well positioned as others to be a new boomtown. Local and state agents were convinced that the Salt River could be made navigable and that before long, the western town would be as booming as Kansas City, St. Louis, or even Chicago. For the white families that relocated to Missouri, Florida was an ideal location. It was positioned along a decent waterway, had plenty of fertile land and woods, and recreated a familiar community. For the enslaved people who were moved with them, this area was a change from the highly agricultural work they might have done in Tennessee or Kentucky. In Missouri there were few large farms and little soil that was amenable for cultivating cotton or other monoculture crops, and, as a result, enslaved people in Missouri toiled on agriculturally diverse smaller farms and in households. However, during the three years that the Clemens family lived in Florida, it quickly became clear that the Salt River would never be made navigable. Not long after, it became apparent that the major and minor train lines through the area, and both major east-west thoroughfares through Missouri, would miss the town by at least thirty miles.
On my first visit in June 2007, the Mark Twain birthplace was hard to find. It took a good bit of effort to make my way to Florida, Missouri. I thought I had missed my exit twice because it was not marked. Eventually, I had to pull over and find a more detailed local map. Signs to it are not posted along State Highway 36 from Kansas City as I drove east toward the Mississippi River, but there are a number of other Missouri boyhood homes advertised. You pass General John Pershing's, Walt Disney's, and J.C. Penney's childhood homes. Although the state marked the place where Sam Clemens was born, the state has moved the cabin a few miles down the road to a museum. The exact spot of Sam Clemens's birth remains uncertain, as you will see in the story that follows. If you are seeking the site of Clemens's origin, you can visit the birthplace cabin inside a museum that resides on the easternmost tip of what is now Mark Twain State Park. On the official map of Mark Twain State Park, the birthplace is noted with just the words "Historic Site."
Mark Twain State Park abuts Mark Twain Lake, an Army Corps of Engineers project that dates to planning efforts in the 1930s when the National Park Service in conjunction with the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and the Missouri State Park Board drafted a master plan for the area that included strategically damming the Salt River and creating a lake for "flat water recreation" and local drinking water supply. The 1930s were a boom for historic preservation. While the Great Depression crippled other fields, the New Deal was good to national and state parks. Historical architects and archeologists were hired for the first time by the federal government to document and preserve American historic structures. However, the Corps of Engineers did not officially begin the lake project until the 1980s, and the lake finally opened to the public in 1986. The area surrounding the historic site and museum is made up of 2,775 acres of state park land and a "55,000-acre land and water project" that makes up the Army Corps of Engineers lake.
On your way into the state park, there is a sign that directs you down a road either to the "Historic Site" or to the "Park Office." The building that houses the birthplace cabin is modern in the extreme. It swoops up at you as you drive down Shrine Road. Made of local limestone, glass, and concrete, and its roof forms a "hyperbolic parabaloid." A sign over the entrance reads, "Mark Twain Memorial Shrine." Nothing here tells visitors whether it is a birthplace, a historic site, or a museum. Visitors have to go inside or read a nearby plaque in order to determine what kind of Mark Twain shrine they have happened upon. Rarely are museums labeled shrines today as they were in 1959 when this building was designed and constructed. The sign above the door speaks to the fact that the act of preserving any historic site or building is itself always a literal act of enshrinement and marks the people who visit as pilgrims seeking the equivalent of authentic religious insight into Mark Twain.
Inside the building to the left is a wing devoted to the birth cabin and to the right is a museum wing. Visitors pay a four-dollar fee and can look into the house and explore the museum. There are no tour guides to introduce or interpret either feature, though there is a short film on Mark Twain's life, which is recommended by the staff person on duty at the front desk in the hall that connects the two wings of the shrine building. In the wing where you find the house, you can look through the windows and doorways into the 1830s two-room home. One room is set up as a multipurpose kitchen with a fireplace filled with cast-iron cookware, a kitchen table, a bed and trundle made up with the requisite log-cabin quilt, child-sized chairs, and marbles scattered across the pine floor as though a child lives and plays here. The other room is recognizable as a bedroom with a large ornately carved bed with pineapple bedposts and an elaborate coverlet, a wardrobe, a trunk, a chamber pot, and a cradle. Oddly, both rooms contain life-like stuffed sleeping cats, perhaps because Sam Clemens was known to love cats. If this is the house where Sam Clemens was born, it is likely that he would only have lived here as an infant for a few months, from his birth November 30, 1835, sometime early that same winter.
The house has three doors and three windows through which you can see the arrangement of historic objects. The staff has neatly whitewashed inside, and the house seems cozy with handwoven rugs in the two rooms and period decorations. Outside the cabin in the front is a wood-chopping block and woodpile, a hand-hewn bench made from a log, and a rattlesnake skin. The tableau is classic pioneer Missouri. It is common at other historic Missouri sites that commemorate western expansion before the Civil War, and not much stands out about this site except the few very nice pieces, like the carved bed, its coverlet, and the cats. Nowhere in the house is there any evidence of the Clemens family. There is no evidence of Jennie, the enslaved woman whom the Clemens family brought with them from Tennessee, who no doubt lived with the Clemenses and their seven children.
At first glance, there is little to lead a visitor to understand that this is anything other than a classic example of a pioneer cabin. Surrounding the house are displays that speak to this same idea of pioneer Missouri. There is an exhibit about women's pioneer handcrafts like weaving and spinning. Two displays remind visitors that they are at a Clemens site. One is a display on Clemens's mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, and the other is a display about his connection to his Aunt Patsey and Uncle John Quarles's farm nearby. The Quarles farm exhibit includes a few archeological finds—some marbles that were found on the farm that Sam Clemens might have played with, two silver spoons that belonged to the Quarles family—and some quotations about the farm taken from Mark Twain's biography. Included is a note about Uncle Dan'l, an enslaved man owned by the Quarles family, who Clemens claimed at various times was a partial model for Jim in his novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The display on Jane Clemens is curious. There is a scene set here—a rocking chair with a small table nearby with an oil lamp, a teacup and saucer, and a copy of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Also on the table is a transcription of Jane Clemens's description of her son's premature birth. A visitor can imagine Mrs. Clemens drinking tea, rocking in her rocking chair, while recalling her famous son's birth, and simultaneously reading his novel. Next to this scene, the display's text reads: "Jane Clemens, 1803–1890: '... she had no career; but she had character, and it was a fine and striking sort.' —Mark Twain's Autobiography." Below these words are two images of her, one is a photocopy of a photograph in which she is wearing a broach that features the miniature photograph of a man, and one is a copy of a painted portrait. A caption explains that Jane Clemens served as the model for Aunt Polly in Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn.
Part of this display is an old clock, a panel about "button strings," where, according to the label, "In the 1800's [sic] young female collectors arranged buttons in lengths known as 'charm strings' or memory strings ... A young woman began with a 'touch button' and the string grew as each friend and relative donated a special button." When she reached either ninety-nine or one hundred buttons, "her love would appear." What this gendered romantic tale has to do with Jane Clemens is unclear. Surely, a woman who had already married and had six living children by the time that Samuel Clemens was born did not spend her time collecting buttons as she pined for a husband. Also on display is an embroidery hoop framing red calico fabric with sloppy needlework in bright red, orange, and green. What this display says about who Jane Clemens was is so confusing that a visitor has to wonder. Did she have a charm string, is that how she met "her love?" Did she do needlework? Did she like clocks?
In the other wing of the shrine building is a small museum. Here items that belonged to Sam and Olivia Langdon Clemens are enshrined in simple displays. The museum includes their carriage, a comb used in Olivia Clemens's hair, a desk, a divan, and many other items that may have belonged to the family when they lived in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1873 to 1891. These items are on display in no particular order and have little to do with Clemens's time in Missouri. Today nearly 15–20,000 people make the convoluted trek to visit these displays and look through the birthplace cabin each year. What they find there does not tell them very much about Sam Clemens or about his connection to Florida. The fact that they continue to visit this place, despite its lackluster interpretation, indicates a desire to understand Clemens through his place of origin. Visitors have made this pilgrimage to Florida for over a hundred years.
Early Pilgrims to Florida
The first guidebook written to aid sightseers looking to find "Mark Twain Country" was Clifton Johnson's 1906 Highways and Byways of the Mississippi Valley. His first-person travel narrative mimics Twain's use of regional dialect at times, as he makes his way first to Hannibal and then to Florida. Over several pages he describes his travels and the house he finds in Florida. He found that "the railroad doesn't go nearer than a half-dozen miles" and it was a "savage sort of highway that I travelled—a chaos of ruts and ridges, mud and pools." The roads looked as if they "had been ploughed by Satan and his imps to plague mankind" and the "low spots were a wild mixture of sticks and stones and liquid clay, and how a team could get along and keep right-side up was a mystery."
Obviously, Johnson's journey to Florida was not easy. Nor was it easy for any literary pilgrim until the roads were paved and the house was moved in 1930 to Mark Twain State Park. In 1905, Johnson might not have found the birthplace without the help of a local woman, who may have led many other tourists to the Clemens houses in Florida. She "remembered distinctly when the Clemens family were [sic] residents of the place." He reported that John Marshall Clemens "built a log house to live in," and "while this log dwelling was being erected, the family occupied a little two-room frame house, and in the kitchen of that house Mark Twain was born, November 30, 1835." Johnson found that the "house still stands, though now vacant and tater ruinous," and that even the log cabin had "survived until recently, but during its later years no one lived in it and people got in the habit of taking away bits of it as Mark Twain relics."
"Why they tore the house pretty near to pieces!" said the old lady. "They'd carry off brick-brickbats from the chimney and pieces of glass from the windows and splinters of wood from the doors and other parts, until they'd got everything but the logs."
Johnson came too late to gather a relic from the log house, where Clemens spent much of the first four years of his life. This fact alone points out that he was not one of the earliest tourists to the area seeking a connection to Clemens's place of origin. By this time, and in spite of the arduous journey along muddy rural roads, most of the traces of the log house were long gone. Yet, most of the framed birth house was intact, though dilapidated. What Johnson does not tell his readers is that relic seekers picked the log house apart because they believed it was Sam Clemens's birthplace—the object of their quest.
As early as 1890, a local debate had arisen as to where exactly Clemens was born. Some locals said he was born in the log house that was slowly razed by memento seekers, others said he was born in the little framed house that Johnson saw on his visit, in a two-story log cabin, in another framed cabin nearby, or at his Uncle John Quarles's house, and some said he was actually born one county over. Wherever Clemens was born, it was significant enough to Twain pilgrims that they often destroyed the physical structures of the cabins, which might have served as cradle for his genius, in their desire to hold on to a relic of him.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mark Twain's Homes Literary Tourism by Hilary Iris Lowe Copyright © 2012 by The Curators of the University of Missouri. Excerpted by permission of University of Missouri Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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