Hannibal Conventions, Trade Shows, Conferences and Meetings
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HANNIBAL might well have been just another medium-sized river settlement, had not Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who renamed himself Mark Twain after the cry of pilots on the Mississippi, spent his boyhood here. Although Hannibal does have other industries, downtown is little more than a Twain theme park, with attractions such as museums, period buildings and wax displays. Just about every business in town is flogging souvenirs featuring Twain's ashen visage, or is named for the scribe, including Huck's Taxi Service, Injun Joe Campground and even the Mark Twain Roofing Company.

Mark Twain wrote surprisingly little about his home town in his extensive nonfiction works; you could say he spoke with his feet when he left for good at seventeen to become a journeyman printer, riverboat pilot, journalist and writer. However, those of his books most specifically set in Hannibal - The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the sequel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - provide vivid accounts of growing up in the rowdy frontier riverport he renamed St Petersburg for his books.

Hannibal's riverside location and historical buildings make it almost disturbingly picturesque. Squeezed between two steep bluffs - Tom Sawyer's " Cardiff Hill " to the north and Lover's Leap to the south - the once-busy community is now quiet except for the occasional creaking of a crane loading cement. You can get an intimate look at the Mississippi aboard the slow-moving Mark Twain riverboat (1hr tour 11am, 1.30pm & 4pm, $9; 2hr dinner cruise by reservation, 6.30pm, $26; tel 573/221-3222). Twain's youthful stomping ground was the short, cobbled incline of Hill Street , at the north end of town. Adjoining the restored Mark Twain Boyhood Home , a simple white-clapboard house where Twain lived between 1844 and 1853, the Mark Twain Museum (summer daily 8am-6pm; rest of year times vary; $6; tel 573-221-9010) includes such memorabilia as first editions, letters, photos, original artwork and one of his trademark white coats.

Immediately opposite, there's a bookstore in the original home of Laura Hawkins (the model for Tom Sawyer's first love, Becky Thatcher), who visited Twain in Connecticut in 1908 and lived on in Hannibal until 1928. Nearby stands the law office of Twain's father, a JP who died of pneumonia while the writer was still a boy. Antique, souvenir and gift stores stretch away from here down Main Street , where the New Mark Twain Museum opened in 1997. Included in the admission price to the origi nal museum and home, the exhibits here re-create scenes from Twain's books, the cave and Huck Finn's raft among them.

Upstairs are the fifteen original Norman Rockwell paintings commissioned for limited editions of Twain's most popular titles. About two miles south of town is the Mark Twain Cave (summer daily 8am-8pm, times vary rest of the year; $12; tel 573/221-1656) where one-hour tours recall Tom's and Becky's frightening misadventure in the dark.

South of Hannibal, Hwy-79 towards St Louis offers one of the most scenic drives along the Mississippi, continually broken by thin, elongated, thickly wooded islands and bounded by towering limestone bluffs.