Richmond, Joshua (b. 1816?), a mason, was Clemens’s first Sunday school teacher at the Old Ship of Zion, a small brick Methodist church situated on Hannibal’s public square. Clemens remembered him as “a very kindly and considerate Sunday-school teacher, and patient and compassionate, so he was the favorite teacher with us little chaps. . . . I was under Mr. Richmond’s spiritual care every now and then for two or three years, and he was never hard upon me” (AD, 16 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:214). Clemens mistakenly recalled in his autobiography and in “Villagers” (95) that Richmond married Artemissa Briggs; in 1849 he married Angelina Cook (Marion Census 1850, 310, 322; “Married,” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 18 Jan 49; Wecter 1952, 86, 183).
