Stout, Ira, a land speculator, was involved in several real estate transactions with John Marshall Clemens. On 13 November 1839, Stout sold Clemens a quarter of a city block in the heart of Hannibal (the northwest corner of Hill and Main streets) for [begin page 350] $7,000. That same day Clemens sold Stout 160 acres of Florida farm land for $3,000, and a week later sold him an additional 326 acres in Monroe County for $2,000. In his autobiography Mark Twain remembered “several years of grinding poverty and privation which had been inflicted upon us by the dishonest act of one Ira Stout, to whom my father had lent several thousand dollars” (AD, 28 Mar 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:274). The transaction by which John Marshall Clemens became responsible for Stout’s debts, alluded to in “Villagers” (104), has not been identified, but when the quarter-block in Hannibal was sold in 1843 for the benefit of Clemens’s creditors, the price amounted to less than $4,000—“a difference so striking,” wrote Dixon Wecter, “as to lend color to the Clemenses’ later bitter prejudice against Stout as a sharp customer.” Wecter’s research of Marion County records led him to characterize Stout as a “dead beat” who became involved “in a web of litigation” with various Hannibal residents, some of whom successfully sued him for nonpayment of debts. By 1850 Stout had moved from Hannibal to Quincy, Illinois (Wecter 1952, 51–52, 56, 69–70; Jackson 1976 [bib20646], 499; “Correction,” Hannibal Western Union, 16 Jan 51).
