In 1926, Hannibal attorney George A. Mahan and his wife Ida and
their son Dulany donated the sculpture of Tom Sawyer and
Huckleberry Finn to the city of Hannibal, in recognition of the
100th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Clemens, writing under the pseudonym of Mark Twain, had written the
novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn which
portrayed life in Hannibal in the first half of the 19th
century.
The New York Times reported 1, at the statue's unveiling, that "the statue
depicts Tom as leaving his boyhood paradise and Huck to engage in
the more serious problems of life, while Huck, not so intelligent
and ambitious, remains among his boyhood scenes."
At the time of the celebration, Mahan was the president of the
State Historical Society of Missouri; in the dedicatatory speech,
Mahan declared 2 "This monument was erected as a tribute
to Mark Twain with the hope that it may be beneficial to the people
of the world, and an especial inspiration to the girls and
boys."
Mahan was, earlier in his career, also instrumental in bringing
the cement industry to Hannibal in 1901, and, as a result, in the
life and politics of the now-disbanded town of Ilasco, just a few
miles south of Hannibal, near the Mississippi. See also The
Lost City of Ilasco Cache. He and his wife are considered by
some to have begun the tourism industry in Hannibal when they
bought the Clemens boyhood home in 1911 3, refurbished it, and donated it to the
city.
The statue was the work of noted Missouri sculptor Frederick C.
Hibbard, who was born in 1881 in nearby Canton, Missouri, studied
electrical engineering at the University of Missouri, and studied
sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago 4. Hibbard had previously sculpted the
Mark
Twain statue that overlooks the Mississippi River in Riverview
Park, as well as the statue of William
Henry Hatch that presides over Central Park.
To log this cache, email me the following information from your
observation of the statue:
- What object does Tom have in his shirt pocket?
- On the back of the statue, one city name is mentioned twice;
what is the city?
- On the ground next to Huck's bare feet there is a tree stump;
what is near Tom's bare feet?
Huckleberry
Footnotes