Mermaid House
Lebanon, Illinois

By Ryan Byrnes

For someone who only ever lived in Midwestern suburbs, I rarely encountered anything pre-dating World War II. Mine was a world of strip malls and gas stations and Arby’s drive-throughs (the quintessential post-church activity). But as a second grader, after packing into the minivan with my siblings for a thirty-minute haul to nearby Lebanon, I could travel two centuries into the past. It felt like what the Celtics used to call “thin places,” where the boundaries between the ordinary and the magical meet.

You see, Lebanon is a small but historic town. With just under 5,000 people, it boasts the oldest university in Illinois and a preserved nineteenth-century main street complete with verandas and gothic windows and four blocks of red brick-paved streets. There, I first saw the Mermaid House.

According to the Lebanon Historic Society, in 1830, retired sea captain Lyman Adams built the Mermaid House, which he named after his professed belief in mermaids. A squat two-story house of hand-sawed oak, it is the ideal rustic prairie home.

Charles Dickens spent a night at the Mermaid House during his tour of North America from January to June 1842, when he traveled by steamboats, railroads, and wagons to speak at major American cities. During his visit to St. Louis, he made a quick excursion to the prairie country in Lebanon. He praised the inn in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation, writing, “In point of cleanliness and comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English alehouse, of a homely kind.” Unfortunately, the nearby prairie did not leave such a lofty impression on him. He described the landscape as “oppressive in its barren monotony” and “scarcely one … to remember with much pleasure.”

Given the historic buildings and the town’s connection to Dickens, the main street took on a Victorian character in the local imagination, so it was only fitting that every holiday season the town put on a Victorian Christmas parade referencing Dickens’ most famous story, A Christmas Carol. Local high school drama clubs would sing carols in period costumes. Shopkeepers would decorate their facades with wreaths. As darkness fell, the town would ceremoniously switch on the Christmas lights, turning the whole street to gold.

One such Christmas, when I was a senior in high school, I took my then-girlfriend to the parade. We rode in a horsedrawn carriage, then I insisted on lining up to see Santa along with the local five-year-olds. In a shed behind the antique store, Santa would sit on his throne, and parents would take their kids to sit on his lap, say what they wanted for Christmas, and snap a photo.

At age eighteen, emboldened by my embryonic frontal lobe, the idea struck me that it would be really funny to get a picture sitting in Santa’s lap, so I dragged my unenthusiastic girlfriend with me. Dickens would have been proud. After waiting in line I finally reached the Big Man’s throne, and we ended up getting a portrait with Santa — me sitting on his knee and my then-girlfriend standing in the background looking like she was about to yell “Bah humbug!” (We did not stay together long.)

After seeing Santa, we walked to the Mermaid House, which the Lebanon Historic Society had preserved and furnished with donated period-pieces like chairs and dressers. Members of the historic society gave a guided tour, recounting the events of Dickens’ stay.

I had read Dickens in school — A Christmas Carol in seventh grade and A Tale of Two Cities in tenth grade — and I always regarded him as so high above me in skill and fame, from another plane of existence. But when I stood in his bedroom just as he would have seen it, I felt connected, as if I might turn around and see Dickens hovering like the Ghost of Christmas Past. At that moment, I came to understand that the Mermaid House is one of those thin places straddling the border between this world and the otherworld, where if you listened carefully, the indelible whispers of the spirits occasionally broke through.

Ryan Byrnes is a book editor in the New York City publishing industry and the author of two books: Royal Beauty Bright and My Dear Antonio. Readers can also find his work in LitHub, Fine Books and Collections, December, National Catholic Reporter, and more. He also contributes to the show The Saints on Relevant Radio. Follow him on Instagram at @ryan.byrnes.writes.

Photo by Edward Moore, 1935. Courtesy of Library of Congress, HABS ILL,82-LEBA,2.

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Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum
Hannibal, Missouri

By Cindy Lovell

The best time to visit Hannibal, Missouri, is right after you’ve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), especially if you chase it with the sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The other best time to visit is when you haven’t read these books in many years. You see, Hannibal stands ready to awaken memories, stir dormant imaginations, and welcome you to its literary folds. The question is, are you ready?

I first read Tom Sawyer in the fourth grade. I would spend the next 30 years trying to get to Hannibal as I reread Tom Sawyer and learned more about its author, Samuel Clemens, pen name Mark Twain.

Although critics claim Huck Finn as the better book, Tom Sawyer provides the gateway where Clemens initially resurrects the people and haunts of his youth. No other town has served the purpose of literature as well as Hannibal. No other author fictionalized his own childhood in such a way as to constantly be inviting all who read the book to come home, come home to Hannibal … or “St. Petersburg.” The line between fact and fiction is lovingly blurred.

My first pilgrimage was in the summer of 1996. Exiting Highway 61 past a handful of motels and diners, I steered downhill until the Mississippi River sprawled before me, a river of rafts and perils and adventures. I ditched the car and climbed across the levee to feel the power of place. Jackson’s Island loomed large. The Mississippi River may border or pass through ten states, but Mark Twain staked Hannibal’s claim on it when he wrote Tom and Huck.

Two kinds of tourists visit Hannibal: those who have read the books and yearn to feel the connection, and those who enjoy nitpicking impossible points and whining about commercialism. Yes, that’s Sam’s face on the Pepsi machines. To those lacking imagination, I say: lighten up.

At the corner of Hill and Main, Sam’s two-story boyhood home surveys the town, his bedroom windows facing the river and Cardiff Hill, scenes that presented irresistible temptation. Missing is the one-story ell upon which Sam (and Tom) landed when climbing out the window. Imagination supplies the invisible summer kitchen where the boys landed. Across the street stands Laura Hawkins’s girlhood home. Laura was the model for Becky Thatcher. Other period buildings complete the scene, such as Sam’s father’s Justice of the Peace Office and Grant’s Drug Store, where the family lived during harder times.

If you squint, power lines and cars disappear, revealing imaginary barefoot boys scampering toward adventure, eluding an unseen Aunt Polly.

Poke your head inside the replica of Tom Blankenship’s home, making sure to duck if you’re on the tall side. Blankenship was Huck’s real-life counterpart, and his house is catty-corner to the Clemens home, providing excellent proximity when the boys meowed to each other as a signal at night. Museum benefactors built this tiny abode on the site of the original home that housed the vast Blankenship clan. The house was rebuilt using period lumber and conjures enough cramped authenticity to remind modern visitors why Huck preferred sleeping in hogshead barrels. They were roomier.

A few blocks north, a memorial lighthouse, absent during Sam’s childhood, invites visitors to climb 244 steps up Cardiff Hill. The vistas of the river are worth it. Take out your copy of Tom Sawyer and reread the passages describing this “Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” Sam got it just right.

As twilight descends, meander farther away from the river toward the Old Baptist Cemetery, where Tom and Huck found “round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none.” In summer, one million lightning bugs await to enchant the devoted reader. You are forgiven if you yield to temptation and go barefoot in the grass.

In the distance a train slouches through town, each whistle unique, composed by the engineer. On Lovers Leap, out-of-towners listen expectantly.

Two miles south, the Mark Twain Cave reaffirms Clemens’s meticulous memory. In Huckleberry Finn, he provided these directions:    

We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our hands and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked under a wall where you wouldn’t a noticed that there was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold, and there we stopped. 

            I have followed those directions to that room. It is uncanny that young Sam knew that cave so well as to remember these directions decades later when he wrote Huckleberry Finn. The oldest cave signature is in this room, dated 1819. Young Clemens himself autographed a cave wall as did his friends. I imagine Sam pulling the pencil out from behind his ear, or maybe his pocket. The cave is sacred ground. Utterly sacred.

Hannibal itself is holy to all who fall under the spell of Sam Clemens’s pen. When Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine writer visited, his only wish was to touch the Mississippi River in Sam’s hometown. He wept.

I have witnessed schoolteachers, students, and others respond similarly. Between my first visit in 1996 and moving there in 2007, I lost count of the dozens of people I brought to explore Sam’s boyhood home. They marveled at the cracks in the plank floors where Tom poured the dreaded Pain-killer. They peered at Becky Thatcher’s house from the parlor window and asked if Laura Hawkins stayed in Hannibal or moved away as Sam did. (She stayed.) They lingered in the kitchen imagining Sandy, a young enslaved boy whose services were rented by the Clemenses, sleeping on a rug.

Their questions attempted to discern fact from fiction. All were worthy visitors. They brought no snipe, no snark, no snide remarks dismissing the commercialization of Hannibal’s most famous resident. They brought respect, curiosity, and imagination. And Hannibal rewards such folks.

Cindy Lovell is a writer and educator. She teaches a course on Tom Sawyer for Quincy University, which is on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. She is the former executive director of both the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum (Hannibal, MO) and the Mark Twain House & Museum (Hartford, CT). Cindy wrote the narrative for Mark Twain: Words & Music, a double-album benefit project for the Boyhood Home, featuring Jimmy Buffett as Huck Finn, Clint Eastwood as Mark Twain, and Garrison Keillor as narrator. Grammy Award-winner Carl Jackson produced the project, and performers included Brad Paisley, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and other fans of Mark Twain.

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Smith Lake Camp
Herman, MI

By Ray E. Boomhower

Writing about the Upper Peninsula of Michigan in his classic regional history Call It North Country (1944), John Bartlow Martin described the expanse as “a wild and comparative Scandinavian tract—20,000 square miles of howling wilderness on the shores of Lake Superior.” Like numerous fishermen, hunters, and hikers before him, Martin was attracted to the UP by its “magnificent waterfalls, great forests, high rough hills, long stretches of uninhabited country, abundant fish and game.”

From his introduction to the region in the summer of 1940, selecting it as a suitably remote site for a honeymoon, to Martin’s death in 1987, the reporter, freelance writer, diplomat, and Democratic presidential speechwriter found himself drawn, again and again, by the UP’s quirky charms. As he warned would-be tourists: “You will have to do nearly everything for yourself. The region is not geared to make your visit painless.” The lack of modern conveniences and the clannishness of the locals could be maddening, he pointed out in Call It North Country (tattered, well-thumbed copies of which can still be found on bookshelves in many UP cabins), but if an outsider adjusted his thinking and fit into the region’s ways, he could find “no better vacation spot.”

The UP, however, became more than just a regular tourist stop for Martin. In January 1964 Martin and his wife, Fran, purchased a 180-acre site outside of Herman, Michigan. Not far from the water’s edge on their property they discovered the ruins of an old trapper’s shack, which they used as a temporary shelter. They constructed a camp (as cabins are known in the region) on top of a high, granite cliff sixty feet above the lake. Enormous white pines towered over the hemlocks located on the cliff, sheltering and shading the cabin.

Martin oversaw the construction by Finnish carpenters of a thirty-foot by thirty-foot log cabin with a large living room, kitchen, bedroom, indoor bathroom, and an enormous fireplace built out of fifty tons of native rock. As Martin’s son Dan noted, his father and mother loved “the wildlife, the remoteness, the sense that they were in touch with nature.” His family remembered that Martin did not believe in cutting down trees or their branches on his land, even if they interfered with the view of the lake from the cabin. “If you want to see the lake,” Martin insisted, “go get in the boat and see it.”

During his family’s summer stays Martin fished, tried his hand at carpentry, did some writing, and relaxed in a sauna that later featured the front page of the New York Times announcing the resignation from the presidency of his longtime political foil Richard Nixon. “No television, no telephone, once a week to town for mail,” he said of his routine. The cabin also became a sanctuary for Martin, a place where he could retreat to when tragedy, as it often did in the 1960s, struck, as when his friend Robert F. Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet in June 1968. At night, Martin, when troubled, could look up and see the Milky Way, appearing like “a white river,” with every star “blazing” as he witnessed “man’s satellites slowly tracking across the firmament.”

I decided while working on a biography of Martin that I needed to visit his Upper Peninsula retreat to get a better sense of what this wild place had meant to him. Martin’s daughter, Cindy Coleman, graciously offered to show me the cabin on a visit I made in September 2013, just before it was shuttered for the upcoming winter. I knew I was in the Upper Peninsula when, upon stepping out of the truck to open a gate so we could proceed along a rugged former logging road to the cabin, a large black fly saw its opportunity and delivered a vicious bite to the back of my neck. The spot still hurt when we passed a small, wooden sign with white letters affixed to a tree near the road that read: “J. B. Martin / Smith Lake.”

Reaching the end of the road, I could barely make out Martin’s cabin, nestled as it was among the trees. Although I did not stay long enough to hear coyotes howling in the night as Martin had done, I sat on the screen porch attached to the cabin, enjoying its dark-wood floor, sturdy beams, and simple, rustic furnishings. Relaxing in one of the wooden chairs, I was stunned, at first, to see that, with Martin’s death, there now was a clear view to the lake through the trees. Watching the waves from the porch as the wind rustled the branches of the nearby trees, I reflected that Martin had made all the right choices when it came to his cabin’s location, but maybe, just maybe, had been wrong about the lake view.

Ray E. Boomhower is a senior editor at the Indiana Historical Society Press. He is also the author of more than a dozen books, including Richard Tregaskis: Reporting under Fire from Guadalcanal to Vietnam, John Bartlow Martin: A Voice for the Underdog, and Robert F. Kennedy and the 1968 Indiana Primary. His next book is about Malcolm Browne, Associated Press Saigon bureau chief in the early 1960s, and his famous photographs of the burning monk.

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