In winter 1819, a natural entrance to a cave was found just south of Hannibal, Mo. Locals came from time to time to see the interesting place. One of those visitors in the early 1840s was a young resident of the river town who was fascinated by what he saw.
“Sam Clemens as a boy came into the cave to explore,” says Vicky Vail, tour guide at the Mark Twain Cave in Hannibal, Mo. “In his own words in his autobiography, he said he tired of most everything he did but he never tired of exploring the cave.”
Through the early and mid-1800s the cave was mostly just local residents who visited. Mark Twain, the author, changed that.
“It wasn’t until the publication of the ‘Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ in 1886 that the locals noticed an increase in the numbers of tourists from other locations, not just from the nation but from around the world,” Vail says.
Those tours continue today with people still coming to the cave immortalized in the novel Tom Sawyer. While Twain’s works were mostly fiction, they resonated with readers.
“So, the people and maybe loosely the events were inspired by real happenings, but the dramatic element and the spectacle of all of it, that was definitely Mark Twain’s genius,” Vail says.
A visit here and you can imagine Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher getting lost in the narrow passages of this cave. But it was also on the approximate six miles of cave walls that visitors began immortalizing their tour. Prior to National Landmark designation in 1972, you could sign your name — many, many people did.
“While we don’t know exactly who some of these people are, we know that they are part of our story,” Vail says. “We have estimated 250,000 signatures throughout the Mark Twain Cave.”
They knew the author himself had visited later in life and penned his name to a wall, but with so many crooks and crannies they could never find it.
“The signature of Samuel Clemens was found in the summer of 2019, so very recently,” Vail says.
Signature analysis was used to verify it. So even though it has been 170 years since Clemens (Mark Twain) played through the cave as a boy, you can still see his name written on the cave wall.
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