MARK TWAIN Huck's home to tell truth of times

A replica of the house of Tom Blankenship, who inspired Huckleberry Finn, will open this summer.
HANNIBAL, Mo. (AP) -- He was "ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had."
That goodhearted boy described by Mark Twain was Tom Blankenship, a childhood friend of young Samuel Clemens -- best known as Twain -- and a model for one of the most significant characters in American literary history, Huckleberry Finn.
Now, a replica of the Blankenship family's ramshackle home is being reconstructed in this Mississippi River town 100 miles north of St. Louis. It's expected to open sometime this summer, according to Henry Sweets, curator of the Mark Twain Museum.
The building will be known as "Huck Finn House," and unlike the picket fence in front of the Clemens family home, there's no whitewashing of the fact that the Blankenship family was poor, on the low end of Hannibal's society at the time.
Discovering truth
The Huck Finn House will be part of a new effort to compare and contrast the reality of Hannibal in the mid-1800s and the fiction of Twain's writings. The Mark Twain Museum has adopted a storytelling format that walks visitors through Twain's childhood, then through the literature he created based on that childhood.
"Sort of Sam Clemens at one end of the street, Mark Twain at the other," Sweets said.
Twain was born in 1835 in nearby Florida, Mo., but his family moved to Hill Street in Hannibal, little more than a stone's throw from the river, when he was 4. He left when he was 17.
It was here that Clemens met the people who became fodder for characters in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," "Life on the Mississippi" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."
Perhaps most notable among them was Blankenship, a boy from a poor family, possibly squatters. Sweets has been unable to find any evidence the Blankenships owned property. He believes they moved around, rented, maybe even took over property they didn't own.
Records from the mid-1800s are sketchy, but word of mouth over the years indicated the Blankenships lived for a time in a two-room cabin on North Street. The house was demolished in 1911, but old photos are aiding in duplicating it.
There was a hitch: A story handed down from a 13-year-old boy who helped tear down the home indicated it was made of logs covered by siding. Just as construction was to begin, a photo was discovered showing conclusively it was a frame home.
Construction was delayed as plans were redesigned to make sure the building is historically accurate. The cost of the privately funded project was not disclosed.
Inspiration for Huck
Sweets said Twain clearly did not base Huck strictly on Blankenship, but on a combination of childhood friends and his own imagination. For example, while Huck was alone except for his abusive father, Pap, Blankenship had a mother, father and siblings.
Still, Twain in his own autobiography wrote that, "in Huckleberry Finn, I have drawn Tom Blankenship exactly as he was."
"His liberties were totally unrestricted," Twain wrote. "He was the only really independent person -- boy or man -- in the community, and by consequence he was tranquilly and continuously happy and envied by the rest of us."
Racial issues
The Twain sites help draw a half-million visitors to Hannibal each year. But some critics contend the focus on the idyllic setting of Twain's fiction, especially scenes from "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," overlooks the harsher reality of life as it really was in what was a rough-hewn, slave-holding town.
"For far too long, Hannibal has told an all-white story about a world that was 25 percent African-American, and really ignored the most important aspect of Sam Clemens' life," said Terrell Dempsey, a Hannibal lawyer and historian who has written a book about slavery in Twain's Hannibal.
"Generally today, Huck Finn and Puddin' Head Wilson are considered Twain's most important works, and they deal with slavery and racism. And it was just ignored in Hannibal, and rather intentionally so," Dempsey said.
The new storytelling method aims to change that. Visitors learn about all levels of society in Hannibal in the 1840s, including the fact that the Clemens family held slaves.
"It's a much more interesting story," said Regina Faden, executive director of the museum foundation. "It's more about what Hannibal was really like."
One display in a newly revised building next to the Clemens home notes that Clemens "spent plenty of time around enslaved African-Americans in childhood. He may have had misgivings about their treatment, but his opposition to slavery didn't surface until later in his life."
The Huck Finn House, focusing on a poor family's life along the Mississippi, will provide "an opportunity to look at another level of society from that time," Sweets said.
XMark Twain Museum: 208 Hill St., Hannibal, Mo.; www.marktwainmuseum.org or (573) 221-9010. The museum is open 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily in April, from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. in May, and from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. June through August. Adults, $6; children 6 to 12, $3. The replica of the Tom Blankenship home is scheduled to be completed this summer.
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