Twainmania

The sleepy town of Hannibal, Mo., braces itself for a deluge of Twain devotees inspired by a forthcoming Ken Burns documentary.

By King Kaufman

Oct 25, 2001 | I found myself wandering alone on a nearly deserted Main Street one recent weekday, admiring the stout brick buildings and enjoying the afternoon heat of the Mississippi Valley.

It was on this very street 156 years ago that Hannibal saw its first murder, the victim falling just over there, in front of Grant's Drug Store. Dr. Grant ordered him dragged inside, and the poor man, Sam Smarr, lay on the floor, blood rushing from bullet holes in his chest, struggling for breath against the weight of a heavy Bible that had been placed over his wounds. The Bible quickly won that struggle, you might say.

One of the gawking townspeople who watched Sam Smarr die was a 9-year-old boy named Sam Clemens, who would not only have nightmares about what he saw for the rest of his life but would re-create the scene in a book he wrote called "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," with Smarr transformed into the town drunk, Boggs -- a slander, no doubt, but one that any of us should be so lucky to suffer.

The street was nearly deserted when I wandered it because it was the lull between summer vacation season and Labor Day weekend. But it won't be long before these streets will be filled with picnickers marching from museum to historical sight to riverboat to antique shoppe, because while many a small river city can match Hannibal for its quaintness, its history, its friendliness and its ready supply of delicious, reasonably priced chicken fingers, there's not one that can compete in the native-son business. Hannibal holds up Mark Twain and all the others, from St. Paul to Natchez, pack up and leave the field.

Florida, Mo., about an hour west by car, a river town but not a Mississippi River town, can one-up Hannibal by pointing to itself as Clemens' birthplace. The future Mr. Twain didn't reach Hannibal until he was 4. But Florida doesn't really exist anymore. Twain wrote that when he was born the town had 100 people, "and I increased the population by one per cent. It is more than the best man in history ever did for any other town." Today a birth would increase the population by 33 percent. And anyway the museum that holds the house he was born in stands in a town called Stoutsville.

So it's to Hannibal that the people will come next spring because they will have watched "Mark Twain" on television in January. "Mark Twain" is a two-part, four-hour documentary by Ken Burns, a much-decorated documentary filmmaker and surrogate vacation planner for a wide variety of Americans. We watched "Civil War" and marched to battle sites, and we'll watch "Mark Twain" and head to Hannibal. Missouri tourism has already benefited from another Burns picture, "Lewis & Clark."

"Our visitation did go up several thousand in 1991," after "Civil War," says Tim Smith of the Shiloh National Military Park in Tennessee. "It was a dramatic rise." Smith says the park, which preserves the scene of the first major western battle of the Civil War in 1862, saw attendance rise about 40 percent to 112,000 in 1991. A brief survey of other Civil War sites turned up similar answers.

"I'm on a Mark Twain high here because I think it's absolutely wonderful," says Ila Woollen, the marketing director and volunteer coordinator for the Mark Twain Boyhood Home in Hannibal. "It can only have a positive impact on us."

The anticipated tourist wave couldn't come at a better time for "America's Hometown." Bed tax revenues were up 3 percent in 1997 and '99, 10 percent in '98 (the year after "Lewis & Clark"). But they were even last year, and Woollen said she'd heard tourist revenue was off 2 percent this year even before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which had a disastrous effect on the tourist industry in general. Travel industry watchers say that Americans are already showing an inclination to abandon plans to fly overseas, choosing instead to vacation within their own national borders.

Next Page: Becky Thatcher's house and Grant's Drug Store

• View blog reactions