Holliday, Melicent S. (b. 1800?), a native of Virginia, was considered the grand lady of Hannibal. She lived just north of town on Holliday’s Hill (called Cardiff Hill in Mark Twain’s fiction) in a mansion built for her by a brother. Anna Laura Hawkins Frazer recalled that when she and Samuel Clemens were young, “our favorite walk” was up Holliday’s Hill:
Mrs. Holiday liked children, and her house, I remember, had a special attraction for us. She owned a piano, and it was not merely a piano; it was a piano with a drum attachment. Oh, ‘The Battle of Prague,’ executed with that marvelous drum attachment! It was our favorite selection, because it had so much drum in it. I must have been about ten at that time, and Sam was two years older. (Abbott, 17)
In “Villagers” (95–96) Clemens mistakenly says Mrs. Holliday’s father was “a British General in the Revolution”; in fact, her grandfather, Angus McDonald, fought in the Continental army and in 1777 was commissioned lieutenant-colonel by George Washington. Mrs. Holliday was married twice. Nothing is known about her first husband. Her second husband, Captain Richard T. Holliday, went bankrupt in 1844. He served as justice of the peace in 1844–45, concurrently with Judge John Marshall Clemens, and was elected city recorder for the years 1846 through 1848. He joined the 1849 gold rush, but died shortly after arriving in California. Having been told by a fortune-teller that she would meet a future husband on the river, Mrs. Holliday frequently traveled on the Mississippi. After the Civil War she lost her property and lived with friends, spending a few days with one, then moving on to another. On several occasions she annoyed the Clemenses in St. Louis by appearing uninvited and remaining for lengthy visits. Pamela Clemens’s daughter remembered the elderly Mrs. Holliday as a “pathetic character” who “finally died in an insane asylum” (MTBus, 50). Mark Twain portrayed her as the widow Douglas in Tom Sawyer, where she is described as “fair, smart and forty, a generous, good-hearted soul and well-to-do, her hill mansion the only palace in the town, and the most hospitable and much the most lavish in the matter of festivities that St. Petersburg could boast” (chapter 5). She reappears as widow Douglas in Huckleberry Finn and in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (134, 153, 156, 165, 208). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Schoolhouse Hill” (MSM, 432) indicate that widow Guthrie (232, 236) was modeled after Mrs. Holliday (Marion Census 1850, 326; Wecter 1952, 157–58; Greene, 96g; NCAB, 15:235–36; Clemens v. Townsend; Missouri v. Owsley;Holcombe, 941; MTBus, 26, 49–50; Morris Anderson, 89–90).
