Biography | Mark Twain — The Hill Street House That Became St. Petersburg

People treat Tom Sawyer's town as invented geography.

The street is still here.

This small frame house at 206-208 Hill Street, Hannibal, was the Clemens family home from 1844 to 1853.

Samuel was eight when they moved in and seventeen when he left it.

The Mississippi ran two blocks east.

What he watched on this street and on that river became the town he later called St. Petersburg.

The whitewashed fence that Tom Sawyer talks his friends into painting stands along the property line.

Laura Hawkins, the girl across the way, became Becky Thatcher.

Tom Blankenship, a neighbor boy, became Huckleberry Finn.

John Marshall Clemens kept a justice-of-the-peace office nearby; that building is part of the present museum complex.

He died in 1847.

Samuel was eleven.

After that the boy set type, delivered papers, and learned the river.

He left Hannibal in 1853 to work as a printer in St. Louis, New York, and Philadelphia, then came back to the Mississippi as a cub pilot.

The house opened to the public in 1912, one of the earliest historic-house museums in the country.

It was named a National Historic Landmark on 29 December 1962.

The present Boyhood Home and Museum complex takes in nine properties: the house, the Interpretive Center at 415 North Main, the Becky Thatcher House, a reconstructed Huck Finn House, Grant's Drug Store, the justice office, a WPA stone shop, and a gallery.

A visitor in 1902 could still find Samuel Clemens himself standing in front of this porch.

A photograph by H. Tomlinson records that visit.

The rooms are small.

The river is still there.

Photo: Andrew Balet, 23 April 2005, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons