Cross, Samuel (1812–86), was seven years old when his family immigrated to Pennsylvania from Ireland. He moved to Missouri in 1837 and by 1840 was a teacher in Hannibal. With John Marshall Clemens, Zachariah G. Draper, and Hugh Meredith, Cross helped found the Hannibal Library Institute. A member of the First Presbyterian Church—like Jane and Pamela Clemens—he was also one of the church’s elders. In the spring of 1849 he led a party of Hannibal citizens to California and settled in Sacramento, where he practiced law and eventually became a judge. Cross ran the school Clemens attended in the mid-1840s, after instruction by Elizabeth Horr and Mary Ann Newcomb. (Cross’s older brother, William, was also a Hannibal schoolteacher, though not one of Clemens’s instructors, as previously thought; see Wecter 1952, 131.) In an autobiographical dictation of 15 August 1906, Clemens recalled the “early days” when Hannibal had only two schools, both of them private: “Mrs. Horr taught the children, in a small log house at the southern end of Main Street; Mr. Sam Cross taught the young people of larger growth in a frame schoolhouse on the hill” (CU-MARK, in MTE, 107). Clemens mentions Cross only in passing in “Villagers” (97). His working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 436) show that he re-created the physical setting of Cross’s school—a frame house on the public square facing Center Street, a “coasting hill”—in the opening chapter of that story, although he based the schoolmaster there on John D. Dawson (Marion Census 1840, 89; Greene, 257; Wecter 1952, 111, 131, 217–18; “Hannibal Academy . . . ,” Hannibal Western Union, 19, June 51; Sweets 1984, 63; “The Emigration,” clipping from unidentified Hannibal newspaper, ca. May 49, facsimile in Meltzer, 15; “We received . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 3 Jan 50; Wright, 282; “Death of Judge Samuel Cross,” Sacramento Bee, 14 June 86, 3; “Death of Judge Cross,” Sacramento Record-Union, 14 June 86, 3; MSM, 436; Marion Census 1850, 311).
