Mark Twain - author with Ulster connections

by Fred Brown

HAD it not been for the collapsing fortunes of a very adventurous soul, Mark Twain, the man which the world came to know and read, just might have been born in East Tennessee in a little cabin on the Wolf River.

  Today, you can see that cabin in which Twain's family and siblings lived in East Tennessee, walk around inside and feel the pages of history come alive in front of you. You can almost sense Twain's beginnings and what set him in motion with a fiery spirit. John Rice Irwin, who started the Museum of Appalachia, has torn down and restored the Clemens family cabin, including the stone chimney, and has made it part of his Museum in Norris, Tennessee.

                                           
  History aside, there is almost irrefutable evidence that Samuel Langhorn Clemens was conceived while the family lived on the banks of the Wolf River and born two months premature on South Mill Street in Florida, Missouri.

(Above) Samuel Langhorn Clemens, the author Mark Twain

  Sam Clemens was the sixth child of John Marshall Clemens, a bright but restless and ill-fated businessman, and Jane Lampton, she of rosy cheeks and auburn curls and prominent Kentucky family.

  The Twains, as pointed out in author Billy Kennedy's book, "Scots-Irish in the Shenandoah Valley" (Ambassador Productions, Causeway Press, 1996), claim some ancestry to an Ulster family.

  John Marshall Clemens, Twain's father, had moved to the edge of the Cumberland Plateau in Gainesboro in 1825 from Columbia, Kentucky, with his young wife, who was already pregnant with their first son, Orion.

  Clemens Sen. was born in Bedford County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia in a family with Co. Antrim roots. Colonel William Casey was the grandfather of Jane Lampton Clemens, Samuel LanghornÕs mother. Casey was of a family who emigrated from Ulster in the 18th century.

  Finding too many lawyers already competing for too-few dollars in Gainesboro, two years later John Marshall Clemens moved his family to the Knobs of Tennessee or Jamestown to  hang out a shingle as a lawyer, where he promptly set out as a barrister and land baron. He built a larger-than-average house and began buying up tracts of land. Lots of land!

  John Clemens eventually wound up with 100,000 acres, which he always believed would lead the way to a fortune for his family. It never did, but John Clemens was a big and bold dreamer nonetheless.

  In 1821 John Clemens again packed up most of his family, leaving Jamestown (also the home of the famous Sergeant Alvin C. York, of World War I fame)  after a series of business set-backs.

  For some bizarre reason, he purchased a 200-acre farm in a little area known as Possum Trot, near Pall Mall, Tennessee, and another farm not far from Jamestown, that eventually caused his financial ruin in East Tennessee.

  The lawyer-turned-farmer opened a post office and a store in Pall Mall. The thing that had attracted him to the area, however, maybe wasn't the farm, but a perpetual motion machine. He saw the contraption and purchased it lock, stock and gears from the family of the fellow who had been killed by the machine. In the meantime, he also purchased a farm, and opened his combination store and postal service. It was madness, but John Clemens kind of madness.

  He was of a mind that he could improve the perpetual motion thing, stop its killing ways, and make a fortune on eternal motion.

  Unfortunately, about the only thing perpetual about the operation was John's mind. He was always setting up another move to bring in another fortune, that seemingly evaporated before arrival.

  Buying the killer-machine portrayed the man, though. John was a brooder and his life was one of perpetual motion, if seemingly always in the wrong direction.

  John Marshall Clemens, it should be noted, moved to the farm alone. Jane Lampton remained in the comforts of the large Jamestown home, mad and exasperated with a husband who flew from one thing to another. She told her husband that she was tired of having children and following him about. She had had four children in five years since their arrival from Kentucky.

  She was not moving to a farm off in some place called Possum Trot. Just as well. For the next several months, John Marshall Clemens farmed and tinkered with his machine and became ill. When Jane finally showed up, he was losing his grip on the store and post office. And quite possibly, reality!

  By 1834, John was down to his boot tops again, practically broke fiscally and physically.

  And about the time he was losing out, the national scene turned sour. A depression swept across the land, finishing off the once-proud lawyer. Writing about his father later, Mark Twain says that the economic crash of '34 wiped him clean as a sun-parched bone.

  In his autobiography, Twain tries to explain his father and the Tennessee land. It was, he writes, "way up there in the pineries and the Knobs of the Cumberland Mountains of Fentress County, East Tennessee."

  The property was always something of a fantasy and a burden. His father had always told his children the land would one day bring immense wealth to the family. Of course, it never did, another lofty dream floating away on the clouds of expectation and illusion.

  "It kept us hoping and hoping for 40 years and forsook us at last. It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us-dreamers and indolent," wrote Twain.

  "We were always going to be rich next year, no  occasion to work.  It is good to begin life poor; good to begin life rich these are wholesome; but to begin it poor and prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagine the curse of it."

  Earlier in his autobiography, Twain says; "with the kindest intentions in the world toward us he (his father) laid the heavy curse of prospective wealth upon our shoulders. He went to his grave in the full belief that he had done us a kindness. It was a woeful mistake but fortunately he never knew it."

  About the time the store and post office began to fail, John Clemens learned from relatives in Missouri that life was booming there on the frontier. His health improved enough with the news that by April, 1835 he had sold off the 200-acre farm, the store and post office and packed up the family for Florida, Missouri.

  He also left behind the perpetual motion machine.   Jane was pregnant again. In November, as Haley's Comet flamed across the void, Samuel Langhorn Clemens, her sixth child, was born.

  On July 4, 1996, the Museum of Appalachia celebrated both the nation's 220th birthday and the state of Tennessee's 200th. And as part of that celebration, John Rice Irwin opened the restored one-room "Twain" log cabin, situated at the upper end of a meadow that overlooks the Museum's entire grounds.

  Inside the cabin he has period furnishings, including the cabin's original mantlepiece over the fireplace. The cabin's original beams are intact, as are most of the poplar logs that form the walls. The cabin's floor, though is not original, and is actually a composite of floors from a structure Irwin purchased earlier. That farm had been owned by Andrew Jackson, another of America's famous Scots-Irish.

  The cabin's centerpiece is the arched fireplace, assembled by the late Fiddlin' Jim Russell, of Clinton. Irwin had the stones numbered and reassembled under the watchful eye of Russell, who also built the Museum's Hall of Fame.
The cabinÕs walls are festooned with period pieces, such as the lamplighter box and white oak baskets and a ladle used so much by a right-handed person, that it is permanently slanted in that direction. There is an early sawbuck oak table, which is older than the cabin. The hearth is graced with a hoecake baker.

  Behind the cabin is a garden and rummaging chickens, which Irwin calls "the Mark Twain chickens," of course. Irwin says the cabin is a jewel in the MuseumÕs crown.

  In 1990, John Rice Irwin heard about the cabin near Jamestown while visiting Andy York, son of the World War I hero Sgt. York.

  "Just a few miles north of the old York home we came upon a tiny, one-room log cabin, setting in an open field, but near a wooded area," Irwin says.

  The old structure was sound in 1990, the first time Irwin saw the cabin. But just six years later, the cabin was beginning to lean, suffering from rain and weather. Some of the thick poplar logs were rotting, and the inside floor was gone.

  The cabin was owned by Ernest Buck, of Pall Mall, who had lived in it as a child. He was so concerned about saving it that he refused to sell it, but donated it to Irwin and the Museum in order that it be preserved.

  Although it is not positively documented that the cabin belonged to the Clemens family, Irwin is convinced he has the authentic home, based not only on local history, tradition and BuckÕs considerable memory, but also on copies of deeds showing that the elder Clemens bought the farm where the old structure stood.

  Irwin thinks the cabin was already on the land when John Clemens purchased the property on the main fork of the Wolf River.

  Irwin says it is noteworthy for East Tennesseans to know that not far from the Clemens cabin were the beginnings of the great statesman Cordell Hull, Alvin York, and, just a few miles away on the Tennessee-Kentucky border, what is thought to be the home of President Harry Truman's ancestors.

  "In addition to dramatising the many famous men and women which Tennessee has produced, this tiny, unpretentious cabin is also intended to remind all native Tennesseans of their ancestors, many of them Scots-Irish, and the Spartan and challenging conditions in which they lived."