A person who has an absurd love of Kentucky might well say that author and humorist Mark Twain — birth name Samuel Clemens — was born with a head start in life. That’s because Twain’s mother, Jane Lampton, was a native of Adair County, in the southern part of Kentucky. And as a young adult, Twain, too, likely spent an appreciable amount of time in the Bluegrass state.
Mom and son had some strong things in common, for sure. Lampton, herself, was known to be a gifted storyteller and is credited for passing her sense of humor to her son. Twain appreciated her influence by giving quite a tribute to his mother when he crafted some of his fictional characters after her likeness. “Aunt Polly,” a part of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, is perhaps the most notable.
Her talents also extended to being a good horsewomen and dancer, and she even picked up some medical skills as a young person while tending to her ill grandfather.
Lampton was born in 1803. Her parents were Benjamin and Margaret Lampton. An interesting tidbit is that her grandfather was William Casey, for which nearby Casey County was named. In 1823, at age nineteen, she married John Clemens in Adair County. According to Tim Talbott in a Kentucky Historical Society article, the marriage was “allegedly to spite a former suitor.”
Jane and John moved to Tennessee where John practiced law and ran a general store. He also served in politics and was labeled a conservative Whig. While in the state, Jane gave birth to five children. The family later moved to the Hannibal, Missouri, area where son Samuel (Twain) was born in 1835, the sixth of a total of seven offspring.
Twain, speaking of her inspirational life, later wrote this of his mother:
My mother was very much alive, {her} age contented for nothing; fond of excitement, fond of novelties, fond of anything going was a sort proper for members of the Church to indulge in…
She was of a sunshine disposition, and her long life was mainly a holiday for her. She always had the heart of a young girl. Through all of the family troubles she maintained a kind of perky stoicism which was lighted considerably by her love of gossip, gaudy spectacles like parades and funerals, bright colors, and animals.
Interestingly, Jane maintained that Samuel was her most difficult child to raise and must have modeled both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn after his own personality. She characterized him as “always adventurous and resisted any type of confinement.”
Jane moved often after John died in 1847. She lived with Samuel in the northern part of New York until he married, then moved in with her daughter, Pamela, not far from Samuel’s home. She next moved to live with son Orion in Iowa, and died there in 1890. She is buried in Hannibal.
I also found a Mark Twain connection to Northern Kentucky, though the details are sketchy. According to The Encyclopedia of Northern Kentucky, before Twain became a well-known writer/humorist, there’s evidence that he lived in Cincinnati or Northern Kentucky. He probably was about age 20 (in the mid-1850s) and worked for the Thomas Wrightson Printing Company. A directory search of the period gave two locations for the company, one in Cincinnati and the other across the river in Newport. However, no personal address for Twain has been found, though one of his biographies noted that he “lived in a boardinghouse close to the print shop.”
Another account of Twain spending time in the area notes that he may have visited at the Alexandria home of Richard Tarvin Baker, a Kentucky state senator and a director of the Alexandria Fair Board (Hey, many years later my dad was a director of the Board, too!). And since Twain liked to use names of his friends and acquaintances as book characters, the fact that he used “Baker” and the name of a prominent Alexandria family at the time, “Thatcher,” makes it, at least, plausible that he was very familiar with the town in Campbell County.
I’d like to think that Mark Twain and his mother had some “Bluegrass pixie dust” put on them while they spent times in our state and that’s at least partly why they did so well… just a thought.
Happiest of the New Year for you and yours.
