Horr, Elizabeth (1790?–1873), born in New York, was Clemens’s first schoolteacher. Her husband, Benjamin W. Horr (1789?–1870), was a cooper and an elder in the Presbyterian Church to which Jane and Pamela Clemens belonged. Samuel Clemens never forgot Elizabeth Horr. Early in 1870, he wrote to her about his marriage and sent her a copy of The Innocents Abroad. She thanked her “kind Pupil” for his “generous expression of remembrance” (Horr to SLC, 16 May 70, CU-MARK). In an 1897 notebook entry for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy,” Clemens recalled “Mrs. Horr, with the little colored pictures as rewards of merit” (NB 41, CU-MARK, TS p. 59). In 1906 he remembered:
My school days began when I was four years and a half old. . . . There were no public schools in Missouri in those early days, but there were two private schools in Hannibal—terms twenty-five cents per week per pupil, and collect it if you can. 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. I was sent to Mrs. Horr’s school, and I remember my first day in that little log house with perfect clearness. . . . Mrs. Horr was a New England lady of middle-age with New England ways and principles, and she always opened school with prayer and a chapter from the New Testament. (AD, 15 Aug 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 107, 108)
He also recalled being disciplined with a switch on the first day of school, as well as Mrs. Horr’s later prediction that he would one day be “President of the United States, and would stand in the presence of kings unabashed” (AD, 10 Sept 1906, CU-MARK). In “Villagers” (95, 95, 97, 101) Clemens alludes to Mrs. Horr or “Mrs. H.” four times (Marion Census 1850, 314; Ellsberry 1965 [bib20416], 17; Sweets 1984, 17, 63).
