Hey, Hannibal: You’ve got the fence, but we’ve got . . . the body

Photo essay by David Higgins,
Elmira, N.Y., Habitué

When most Missourians think of Mark Twain, they think of Hannibal, Missouri. That’s where he was born – and, yes, the famous white-washed fence lives there. Hannibal also boasts the Boyhood Home, a couple of Twain museums, and loads of tourist-magnet bric-a-brac.

Well, too bad, Hannibal, because Elmira, New York, has you well beat:
We have him. His bones, that is.

Not one person in ten thousand could name where Mark Twain (nee Samuel Langhorne Clemens) lies buried. The answer is Elmira, a sleepy, decaying town in upstate New York, deep set in a region with more cows than people and just 23 miles from my home in Corning, New York. I know Elmira well. This settlement on the Chemung River, current population 26,000 and sinking, was quite nice until 1972, when it got clobbered by the historic Hurricane Agnes flood. Worse yet, the idiot City Fathers banked the city’s renewal on building prisons. (Yup, the Ye Olde Jobies argument.) But even the prisons were eventually shuttered. And now crackheads are breaking into the abandoned Southport Correctional Facility to steal copper. Elmira’s beautiful housing stock is crumbling, Sudafed and baby formula are under lock and key at the local drugstores, and the only people prospering are the absentee landlords. It’s in the same All-American plight as any number of rust-belt towns across the Northeast and Midwest.

On the other hand, Hannibal, the OG Twain city, remains delightful – in large part because the dread hand of corporate Disneyfication has not squeezed the life out of it. It banks its prosperity on the Twain thing, of course, but it remains the charmingly cheesy tourist town that you once saw advertised in the back pages of National Geographic. It hasn’t been engineered and focus-grouped by The Suits for maximum profit extraction. The “attractions” grew organically. The parking sucks. One of the museums looks like your crazy grandpappy’s attic, with no proper organization or labeling. Twain would have loved it, although he would likely cock a shaggy eyebrow at the obese tourists waddling through Huck Finn’s House before gorging themselves at the nearby Saints Avenue Buffet (formerly a Golden Corral). Some of the local Mississippi River character has been cemented over to create huge docks for huge cruise ships; we’ll see if the town gets tourista tidal waves or trickles. (I’m hoping for a steady trickle; enough to keep the place up without running it over.)

Everybody wants a piece

Hartford, Conn., also lays claim to a chunk of the Twain legacy, but rates only a brief mention. Once Mark got rich, he moved there for the express purpose of being close to his publisher; hardly exciting stuff. The Twain Home there is nifty— Twain biographer Justin Kaplan wrote that it is “part steamboat, part medieval fortress and part cuckoo clock” – but Mrs. Clemens (nee Olivia Louise Langdon) refused to live there after the premature death of her daughter, Susy. Today, Hartford is just as depressing as Elmira; it, too, has been curb-stomped by the Blight Fairy.

Back to Elmira, the “Queen City.” Samuel Clemens and Olivia Langdon were married in 1870 at the splendid Langdon family mansion at Main and Church. The Clemens and Langdon families entertained many luminaries there, including U. S. Grant and a then-unknown Twain groupie named Rudyard Kipling. The Langdon descendants offered it to the Elmira City Fathers for dirt cheap, but – cue the violins – it was bulldozed in 1939. On the plus side, at least Elmirans don’t have far to go for Cold Cut Combos or hair extensions.

Here’s the Clemens family obelisk in Elmira’s Woodlawn Cemetery. It’s exactly two fathoms tall. (Get it? “Mark twain,” the esteemed author’s nom de plume, is the nautical term that means the water is deep enough for a steamboat.) But, what’s this? Twain shares the obelisk with one Ossip Gabrilowitsch, whose name has the ring of a Mad Magazine doofus. Ossip, a Russian pianist, was his son-in-law, and Jewish, no less. Twain was no bigot – in 1896 he wrote a long essay condemning the anti-Semitism he saw rampant in Austria – but considering the attitudes of the time, it’s delicious to picture plummy WASPS all a-splutter that our most intrinsically American writer shares his monument with a, umm, Hebrew.

What explains this odd Mark ‘n’ Ossip double-billing? The unusual amalgam springs from Twain’s only surviving daughter, Clara, who commissioned it in 1937. She was a moderately talented contralto, and during the family stay in Austria, she met and fell in love with her accompanist, Ossip.  Elegant and cultured as he was, Clara’s parents fretted that she was easy prey for exploitation by a bohemian aesthete with iffy finances and a funny name. Clara had always had a somewhat troubled relationship with her dada – Susy was the favorite daughter – and her marriage to Gabrilowitsch is thought to be partly motivated by defiance. Clara got the last word when she planted the obelisk. Take that, Mom and Dad!

Here’s Sam’s headstone, a humble and generic affair (M.T. would have approved), identical to the other Langdon/Clemens graves in the family plot. He originally wished to be cremated – one assumes he wanted his ashes dumped in the Big Muddy – but Clara preferred something more dignified. He surely would have snorted at the “You are loved” trinket, but it beats the snot out of the chewing gum wads that litter Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris.

In late 2015, a “poor white,” as Clemens would have termed him, stole the Twain plaque by prying it loose with a crowbar. Predictably, he was swiftly caught after trying to fence it. Sheesh. This made the national news for a few minutes. One inevitably wonders: What would Pap Finn or Huck be like if they were around today? Shoplifting from the dollar store to feed a habit? Vandalizing graves in the dead of night?

Understandably, the Elmira Chamber of Commerce flogs the hell out of the town’s Twain associations, beginning with the first thing you see off the highway exit, a decrepit billboard, with Mark presiding. In his cohort are forgotten movie mogul Hal Roach, Heisman trophy winner Ernie Davis, space shuttle pilot Eileen Collins, Underground Railroad conductor John Jones, and some putz named Tommy Hilfiger. The disfigured gent at far left is disgraced news anchor Brian Williams – busted for faking combat experience – whose only real contribution to humanity was siring the hot chick on Girls, Allison Williams. The sign is cracked, faded and falling apart, and there’s no money to fix or replace it.

Most of Elmira’s other Twain references seem a little desperate in context of the city’s decay. The Mark Twain Motel, for instance, has cycled through wholesome family enterprise to hot-pillow joint to homeless shelter. There’s a Twain ice cream stand and a nature trail, and he pops up in several murals around town. The perfunctory Twain exhibit in the underfunded local history museum has been ho-humming schoolchildren since The Love Boat was top 10 in the Nielsens.

For two decades, the Clemens family spent their Elmira summers at Quarry Farm, his in-laws’ secondary residence, on a winding road with a pretty view of the Chemung valley. (Hal Roach, yes, from the decrepit town sign, used to deliver newspapers to the author at this address!) All three daughters were born there. It’s off-limits to the public without prior approval, but it’s still a place of pilgrimage for the dwindling number of academics who still care about Our Greatest Writer. (Twain employed that word, so today’s American Lit majors study him at their own risk.)

Hartford, where the Clemenses settled in 1874, provided so many distractions and social obligations that Mark’s writing suffered. Recognizing this, a benevolent Langdon sister-in-law built a refuge for him on Quarry Farm that same year. It served the additional purpose of keeping his stinky stogie smoke away from the main residence. The now-famous “Mark Twain Study” is shaped like a steamboat’s pilot house, and Twain himself said it “may be called the home of Huckleberry Finn and other books of mine, for they were written here.” (Take that, Hannibal!) The cabin was moved to Elmira College in 1952, where it stands today. (Olivia was an alumnae of the college.) It’s open by appointment, but there’s nothing inside it (Why tempt the meth heads?). Elmira College also owns Quarry Farm and has a small collection of Twain’s papers and artifacts. (EC is a safety school’s safety school; founded in 1855 as the first women’s college in the U.S, it has been coed since 1969 and is now a very weak sister to the likes of Swathmore and Bryn Mawr.)

Alas, Twain’s last years were unbearably sad. His writing mojo had long since bailed on him, and he bankrupted himself through foolish investments; worst of all, those he loved were taken from him in cruel and/or gruesome ways. He outlived three of his children, including a son, Langdon, who died in infancy. Pretty Susy died rather suddenly at age 24 from spinal meningitis. Mrs. Clemens was always sickly, and after decades of infirmity, she died in 1900 from Pott’s Disease (tuberculosis of the spine). Jean drowned in a bathtub at age 29 during an epileptic seizure – on Christmas Eve, no less.  All of them, including the only grandchild (who died in 1966 of a booze and drug overdose in Hollywood and left no descendants) lie clustered together on the Langdon plot. It is a melancholy place, and the surrounding cemetery looks sloppy and down-at-heel due to budget cuts and poor maintenance.

Yes, Elmira has Twain’s crumbling remains, but that seems just a little incongruous. To wit: Why wasn’t he buried in Hannibal? Because Sam was truly devoted to Olivia – it was a gen-u-ine love match – and he wouldn’t have minded spending eternity with her (even though he didn’t believe in an afterlife). Then too, the Langdon ladies understandably wanted him planted next to the rest of the clan. So there.

Summary Judgment: Even though Hannibal lacks the body, it retains his soul. Elmira is a must-visit for Twain completists, but Hannibal spawned the real-life prototypes of Tom and Huck. And what’s more, it has the Mississippi River.  Take that, Elmira!

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Elmira Alert!

As this article goes to press, Elmira has suddenly exploded onto the national news. The local authorities, citing a wildlife regulation, euthanized an Instagram-famous pet squirrel named Peanut. At last check, Peanut had nearly 1 million followers on Instagram and Facebook. The resulting internet furor drew the attention of The New York Times, USA Today, and tweeters such as Elon Musk and V.P.-elect Vance.

A local wag pasted a large cutout of Peanut on the sign that first greets visitors to Elmira. Mark Twain chortles in his grave — yet again.

Pretty nifty, yes?

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David Higgins hails from the flyspeck town of Deposit in upstate New York and is a graduate of the State University of New York at Binghamton (1984) and Louisiana State University (1988). He retired in 2021 from Corning Community College, where he taught art for thirty years. David is now a full-time oil painter, who specializes in realistic landscapes that often feature tumbledown and decaying homes and factories.

Editor’s Note:
I first met the brilliant, highly productive creative David Higgins (painter, writer, musician, etc.) when I attended the state university in Binghamton, New York. For 44 years, I have enjoyed his wide-ranging artistic output (my walls boast many of his art works). Dave reminds me that I hosted his first-ever art show in the hallway of my third floor apartment in Johnson City, New York. I fondly remember going on long wanders with him through the rusty factory towns of Broome County, New York. On one railroad track amble, I remember us coming upon huge piles of abandoned inner soles; they were the last monument, albeit spongy, to the Endicott-Johnson Corporation, once among the largest shoe manufacturers in the world. We sighed, fingered a few, and then continued onward a mile or so to a no-frills concrete bridge built in 1914; there, we let generous gobs of spit drop down to the flashing minnows, who eagerly ate it up.