May 15 Monday – Sam was the guest at the summer home (“Woodside”) of John Garth, “A popular schoolmate of Sam’s, beginning at Mrs. Horr’s…son of a tobacconist who taught the boys at Sunday school in the Presbyterian church” [Wecter 144]. Garth had married another childhood friend, Helen Kercheval and made his fortune in New York [Rasmussen 163]. He returned in 1871 to live in Hannibal, now a town of 15,000. Garth was president of the Farmers & Merchants Bank in Hannibal [MTNJ 2: 513n269]. The town now boasted paved streets and a large railroad depot where six lines came together. It was John Marshall Clemens who led the push to charter a railroad to Hannibal back in the 1840s. It must have seemed to Sam that the railroads had destroyed the steamboats, and the river life that he knew.

In the morning Garth’s black coachman called for Sam at 10 instead of 7:30 and excused himself by saying that time was an hour and a half slower in the country. The servant drove Sam around and then delivered him the three miles to the Garth home [MTNJ 2: 478].

John Brown, Jr. wrote from Edinburgh to advise of the death of his father on the morning of May 11. “We were all with him at the last….Inflammation of the lungs” [MTP].

Charles L. Lamb wrote inviting Clemens to the Missouri State Medical Assoc. banquet for May 17 Sam [MTP]. Sam replied to Lamb, declining.