Hawkins family. Six members of the family are mentioned in “Villagers,” and Mark Twain used two Hawkins children in his books.
Sophia Bradford Hawkins (b. 1795?) and her husband, Elijah, a farmer, moved to Missouri from their native Kentucky in 1839 with their children and slaves. They bought a large tract of land in Ralls County, but resided chiefly in Hannibal, in Marion County. They had ten children, eight of whom can be identified: Eleanor, Jameson F., Benjamin M., Elijah (’Lige, or ’Lije), Catherine (Kitty), George William (Buck), Anna Laura, and Jefferson. According to “Villagers” (95), Mrs. Hawkins was widowed by about 1840 (Portrait, 248–49; Jackson 1976 [bib20647], 51; Marion Census 1840, 90; Marion Census 1850, 305; “A ‘green one,’ . . . ,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 25 Mar 52; Frazer, 73; William Bowen to SLC, 31 Mar 70, CU-MARK).
Benjamin M. (Ben) Hawkins (b. 1822?) went to California in the 1849 gold rush and returned to Hannibal in 1851. He served as a second lieutenant in the Mexican War and was Hannibal city marshal in 1852, 1853, and 1855. In 1856 he was elected county sheriff on the Know Nothing ticket, and he later became a lieutenant colonel in the Confederate Army. Clemens mentions him in “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and “Villagers” (95). Working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383–84) indicate that Captain Haskins, the militia captain and sheriff (167, 185, 188, 208, 213), is modeled after him (Marion Census 1860, 768; “The Emigration,” clipping from unidentified Hannibal newspaper, ca. May 49, facsimile in Meltzer, 15; “Late from California,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 29 Nov 49; “Local Items,” Hannibal Western Union, 16 Jan 51; Holcombe, 284, 331–32, 428, 941; Portrait, 248, 249).
Elijah (’Lige, or ’Lije) Hawkins (b. 1828?) opened a Hannibal dry goods store in January 1849. In “Villagers” (95), Clemens writes that he became a “rich merchant in St Louis and New York,” but Hawkins was still a resident of Hannibal in 1870. The marginal note “’Lige” on the final manuscript page of “Tupperville-Dobbsville” (CU-MARK) suggests that Clemens planned to use Hawkins in that story (Marion Census 1850, 305; “O! For California! New Firm,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 31 June 49; Caroline Schroter to Jane Lampton Clemens, 29 May 70, CU-MARK).
Sophia F. C. Hawkins (b. 1833?), a native of Kentucky, is said in “Villagers” (95) to [begin page 323] have married a “prosperous tinner” In 1850 she was living with the widowed Sophia Bradford Hawkins, Elijah, and Anna Laura, but her exact relation to them has not been determined (Marion Census 1850, 306).
Anna Laura Hawkins (1837–1928), born in Georgetown, Kentucky, on 1 December 1837, was only a few years old when her family moved to Hannibal. Laura, as she was called, at one time lived in a two-story frame house on Hill Street, almost directly across from the Clemenses. She and Samuel Clemens were childhood playmates, sweethearts, and classmates. “I remember very well when we moved into the house opposite where Mr. John M. Clemens lived,” she said in an 1899 interview. “I remember also the first time I ever saw Mark Twain. He was then a barefooted boy, and he came out in the street before our house and turned hand-springs, and stood on his head, and cut just such capers as he describes in Tom’s ‘showing off’ before Becky. We were good friends from the first” (Fielder, 11). In 1913 she recalled that she “liked to play with him every day and all day long. Sam and I used to play together like two girls. He had fuzzy light curls all over his head that really ought to have belonged to a girl.” She remembered him as “a gentle boy, and kind of quiet, and he always did have that drawl. He was long-spoken, like his mother” (Abbott, 17). In 1918 Laura said:
The first school I went to was taught by Mr. Cross, who had canvassed the town and obtained perhaps twenty-five private pupils. . . . Mr. Cross did not belie his name . . . Sam Clemens wrote a bit of doggerel about him. . . .
Cross by name and Cross by nature,
Cross hopped out of an Irish potato.
. . . After a year together in that school Sam and I went to the school taught by Mrs. Horr. It was then he used to write notes to me and bring apples to school and put them on my desk. . . . We hadn’t reached the dancing age then, but we went to many “play parties” together and romped through “Going to Jerusalem” [also called musical chairs], “King William was King George’s Son,” and “Green Grow the Rushes—O.” (Frazer, 73)
She also recalled: “He took me out when I was first learning to skate, and I fell on the ice with such force as to make me unconscious; but he did not forsake me” (Wharton, 676). Laura Hawkins attended Van Rensselaer Presbyterial Academy in Rensselaer, Missouri, and in 1858 married James W. Frazer (1833–75), a Ralls County physician, with whom she had two sons. Although Clemens mistakenly believed her dead when he wrote “Villagers” in 1897, she had returned to Hannibal in 1895 and become matron of the Home for the Friendless. Clemens dined with her in Hannibal in 1902 and in October 1908 had Laura and her granddaughter as guests at his home in Redding, Connecticut, when he gave her his photograph inscribed “To Laura Fraser, with the love of her earliest sweetheart” (MoFlM). Laura Hawkins is mentioned in “Letter to William Bowen” (21) and in “Villagers” (95). She probably influenced the characterization of Amy Johnson in “Boy’s Manuscript” (1–18). Mark Twain portrayed her as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and “Schoolhouse Hill” (218), and used her name for one of the principal characters in The Gilded Age (Wecter 1952, 181–83; “Mrs. Fraser Dies; Chum of Twain,” New York Times, 27 Dec 1928, 23; “Laura Hawkins Frazer Always Remembered as Idol of His Boyhood,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, 6 Mar 1935, 3C; Holcombe, 647; photograph of the Frazers’ gravestone in Rensselaer, Missouri, courtesy MoFuWC).
[begin page 324] Jefferson Hawkins, Laura’s brother, is mentioned in “Villagers” (95). He died when very young and was buried in Hannibal (Portrait, 248).
