Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site | |
---|---|
Location | Monroe County, Missouri, United States |
Coordinates | 39°29′18″N 91°47′09″W / 39.4884°N 91.7857°W [1] |
Area | 13 acres (5.3 ha) [2] |
Elevation | 633 ft (193 m) [1] |
Established | 1924 [3] |
Visitors | 59,002 (in 2022) [4] |
Operator | Missouri Department of Natural Resources |
Website |
mostateparks |
Mark Twain Birthplace Cabin | |
NRHP reference No. | 69000116 |
Added to NRHP | May 21, 1969 |
The Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site is a publicly owned property in Florida, Missouri, maintained by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, that preserves the cabin where the author Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. [5] The cabin is protected within a modern museum building that also includes a public reading room, several of Twain's first editions, a handwritten manuscript of his 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and furnishings from Twain's Connecticut home. [5] The historic site is adjacent to Mark Twain State Park on a peninsula at the western end of man-made Mark Twain Lake. The cabin was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969. [6]
Samuel Clemens, later known by the pen name Mark Twain, was born in the two-room house on November 30, 1835. [7] The house was rented by his parents Jane Lampton Clemens (1803–1890) and John Marshall Clemens (1798–1847). [8] Clemens spent his first four years here until the family moved to a two-story clapboard house, now memorialized as the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum in Hannibal, Missouri, in 1839. [9]