Quarles family.
John Adams Quarles (1802–76) was Clemens’s uncle. Clemens was particularly fond of him and stated in his autobiography, “I have not come across a better man than he was” (SLC 1897–98, 36–37, in MTA, 1:96). Quarles married Jane Lampton Clemens’s younger sister, Martha Ann (Patsy) Lampton (1807–50), with whom he had ten children. In the mid-1830s the family moved from Tennessee to Florida, Missouri, where John Quarles built a general store and became a prosperous shopkeeper and farmer, active in the town’s development. He purchased over 230 acres of farm land near Florida and by Clemens’s recollection owned some fifteen or twenty slaves. Until Clemens was about twelve, he spent two to three months every year on the Quarles farm, which some fifty years later he recalled as “a heavenly place for a boy.” Clemens acknowledged that while he “never consciously used” Quarles in a book, “his farm has come very handy to me in literature, once or twice. In ‘Huck Finn’ and in ‘Tom Sawyer Detective’ I moved it down to Arkansas. It was all of six hundred miles, but it was no trouble” (SLC 1897–98, 37, in MTA, 1:96). Mark Twain’s working notes for “Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy” (HH&T, 384) identify Quarles as the model for Uncle Fletcher; in the story, mention is made of Uncle Fletcher’s farm, thirty miles from St. Petersburg (154, 155, 156), but the character himself does not appear (Selby, chart 23, 134; Wecter 1952, 36, 40, 50; Gregory 1969, 230–33).
James A. (Jim) Quarles (1827–66), John Adams Quarles’s son, was born in Tennessee and brought to Florida, Missouri, as a child. In 1848 he moved to Hannibal and opened a copper, tin, and sheet iron manufactory in partnership with George W. Webb. In 1851 James married sixteen-year-old Sophronia (Fronnie) Reno, with whom he had two sons. By the fall of 1852 he had entered into two additional business partnerships to sell stoves, but both of these enterprises failed. Clemens records Quarles’s “dissipation” and neglect of business and family in “Villagers” (97). In an August 1897 notebook entry Clemens included James Quarles in a list of characters for “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (NB 42, CU-MARK, TS p. 24, in S&B, 173), but no one based on him figures in the story (Bible 1817; Marion Census 1850, 310; Selby, 133; marriage notice, Hannibal Journal and Western Union, 2 Oct 51, cited in Wecter 1950, 7; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Western Union, 7 Aug 51; “Dissolution,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 2 Sept 52).
