Nash family.
Abner O. Nash (1804?–59) opened one of Hannibal’s first general stores in 1831, when there were fewer than a dozen families living in the area. He was elected to the town’s first Board of Trustees, later was its president, and was a founding member of the Presbyterian Church. He declared bankruptcy in 1844, and in 1849 accepted the low-paying postmastership. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) alludes to him as “the aged and needy postmaster, who had seen better days” (chapter 5). Twice married, Nash and his second wife, Andosia, had six children residing with them in 1850. Nash is mentioned in “Villagers” (96). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 383) indicate that postmaster Oliver Benton (166) was modeled after him (Marion Census 1850, 318; Greene, 281; Wecter 1952, 298 n. 15).
Mary Nash (b. 1832?) was the postmaster’s daughter by his first marriage. In his autobiography, mistakenly calling her Mary Lacy (the name of another schoolmate), Clemens claimed she was one of his early infatuations but was “out of my class because of her advanced age. She was pretty wild and determined and independent. She was ungovernable, and was considered incorrigible. But that was all a mistake. She married, and at once settled down and became in all ways a model matron and was as highly respected as any matron in the town. Four years ago she was still living, and had been married fifty years” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:213). In “Villagers” (96) Clemens wonders if Mary Nash had married Samuel R. Raymond; she actually married John Hubbard of Frytown in 1851. On her fiftieth wedding anniversary she sent Clemens a greeting and he responded with congratulations. Working notes show that he considered portraying her as “wild” Mary Benton, the daughter of postmaster Oliver Benton, in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as “bad” Louisa Robbins in “Schoolhouse Hill,” but the characters do not appear in the stories (HH&T, 383; MSM, 431). In his characterization of Rachel (“Hellfire”) Hotchkiss (119–33), Mark Twain may have drawn on his recollection of Mary Nash (Marion Census 1850, 318, 319; “Married,” Hannibal Western Union, 23 Jan 51; SLC to Mary Nash Hubbard, 13 Jan 1901, MoHM).
Thomas S. (Tom) Nash (b. 1835?), Mary’s half brother, was one of Clemens’s playmates, a Cadet of Temperance, and a fellow pupil in Samuel Cross’s school. In his autobiography Clemens recalled the winter night when he and Tom skated on the Mississippi, with Tom falling through the ice; the accident led to “a procession of diseases” culminating in scarlet fever, which left Tom deaf (AD, 12 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:97–98). In working notes for the “St. Petersburg Fragment,” an early version of his “Mysterious Stranger” tale, Mark Twain wrote that “Tom Nash’s mother took in a deserted child; it gave scarlet-fever death to 3 of her children & [begin page 338] deaf[ness] to 2” (MSM, 416). In the Jacksonville, Illinois, asylum for the deaf and dumb, Tom learned to talk in a loud unmodulated voice. He returned to Hannibal in 1849, worked in the post office for four years, was apprenticed to William T. League of the Hannibal Messenger, and in later years was a house and sign painter. When Clemens returned to Hannibal in 1902, “old and white headed” Tom Nash greeted him at the train station, made a trumpet of his hands at Clemens’s ear, nodded toward the crowd, “and said, confidentially—in a yell like a fog horn—‘same damned fools, Sam’” (AD, 12 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:98–99). Clemens recalls Nash in “Villagers” (96). His working notes show that he considered portraying Nash as Jack Benton in “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” and as Frank Robbins in “Schoolhouse Hill” (HH&T, 383; MSM, 431), but the characters do not appear in the stories (Marion Census 1850, 318; Cadets of Temperance 1850; Thomas S. Nash to SLC, 23 Apr 85, CU-MARK; Fotheringham, 44; Stone, Davidson, and McIntosh, 163).
