Hannibal by 1844 took pride in four general stores, three sawmills, two planing mills, three blacksmith shops, two hotels, three saloons, two churches, two schools, a tobacco factory, a hemp factory, and a tan yard, as well as a flourishing distillery up at the still house branch. West of the village lay “Stringtown,” so called because its cabins and stock pens were strung out along the road. Small industry was the lifeblood of the town.
December – The Clemens family moved out of the Virginia House and into 206 Hill Street, which forever more would be considered Sam’s boyhood home. Sam shared a second-story bedroom with his brother Henry [Powers, MT A Life 34].
Summer – A measles epidemic swept through Hannibal. Sam’s mother was obsessed with keeping her children from contracting the disease, but Sam decided to expose himself. Sam snuck into his friend Will Bowen’s house and bedroom. He was discovered and chased away, but tried again and slipped into bed with Will. Rediscovered by Will’s angry mother, Sam was taken home, but contracted measles. “I have never enjoyed anything in my life any more than I enjoyed dying that time” [Powers, Dangerous 85].
September 14 Saturday – Henry, a Negro, was tried and convicted in Judge Clemens’ court of “menacing” with a knife. State law prohibited slaves from having weapons. John Marshall Clemens found Henry guilty and imposed punishment of 20 lashes to be given publicly. Dempsey writes, “Nine-year-old Sam liked to play about Hannibal on pretty fall days. A public whipping would have been high entertainment in 1844 Hannibal” [54].
October 22 Tuesday – Sam watched worshippers from the Millerite sect (led by William Miller) wrap themselves in robes and climb the steep hill to Lover’s Leap, expecting the world to end. In his visit back to Hannibal in 1902, Sam and pal John Briggs (1837-1907) went up Holliday’s Hill and pointed over the valley.
“There is where the Millerites put on their robes one night to go up to heaven. None of them went that night John but no doubt many of them have gone since” [Wecter 89].
November 30 Saturday – Sam’s ninth birthday (he didn’t want to be called “Sammy” any longer.) In his 1906 Autobiography, Sam claimed to be a private smoker from age nine, and a public one after his father’s death, in 1847 [Neider 43].
1845 – From Sam’s Autobiography:
I recall Mary Miller. She was not my first sweetheart, but I think she was the first one that furnished me with a broken heart. I fell in love with her when she was eighteen and I nine—but she scorned me, and I recognized this was a cold world….I soon transferred my worship to Artimisia Briggs, who was a year older than Mary Miller. When I revealed my passion to her she did not scoff at it. She did not make fun of it. She was very kind and gentle about it. But she was also firm, and said she did not want to be pestered by children.
January 24 Friday – Sam witnessed the premeditated murder of “Uncle” Samuel Smarr (1788?-1845), shot at close range by William P. Owsley. Smarr was carried into the drugstore of Dr. Orville Grant, the very house that poverty would soon force the Clemens to move into. Sam squeezed into the room where they laid the dying Smarr and watched [Wecter 106]. Note: The scene would be grist for Colonel Sherburn’s cold-blooded killing of Boggs, the town drunk, in chapters 21-22 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
February 24 Monday – Hannibal, Mo. was granted a city charter [Hannibal Courier-Post, Mar. 6, 1935 p10b].
March 19 Wednesday – From the Hannibal, Mo. Library web site: “In 1840 many citizens of Hannibal, Missouri felt a need for a public library. Judge John Marshall Clemens (Mark Twain’s father), Zachariah Draper (1798-1856), Dr. Hugh Meredith, and Samuel Cross (1812-1886) took on the responsibility of this task. They organized the Hannibal Library Institute. On March 19, 1845 this library was chartered by the General Assembly of Missouri. The books were kept in Dr. Meredith’s office in a building at the corner of Main and Bird Streets. This was not a free library.
Summer – Sam stowed away on a steamboat headed south. He was found by a crewmember and put ashore thirty miles down river, at the town of Louisiana, Mo. There he spent the night with Lampton relatives. The next day they returned him home.
August 24 Sunday – In Hannibal, John Marshall Clemens wrote to Orion in St. Louis. He enclosed a course of twenty oral lectures on grammar by Professor Hull. John was taking Hull’s class and promised to outline the material and send it on to Orion, who might benefit in the printer’s trade from such lessons. Sam was nearly ten years old and probably received the same instruction at home [MTBus 9-10].
August 25-26 Tuesday – The Philadelphia North America reported on Aug. 26, “Affray at Hannibal, Mo.”—a fight between Dr. Orville R. Grant and a man named Railey, who stabbed Grant with a spear attached to his cane. In his Dec. 2, 1906 A.D. Sam recalled the man’s name as Dr. Reyburn [AMT 2: 590].
Fall – In either 1844 or 1845, Sam left the dame school for a “good common school” on Center Street near the town square, taught by a middle-aged Irishman, William O. Cross [Powers, D. Waters 93].
November 6 Thursday – Record of Jimmy Finn’s death [MTP].
November 30 Sunday – Sam’s tenth birthday.
Hard times forced the family to move in with Dr. Orville R. Grant’s family (above Grant’s Drug store; Grant 1815?-1854). Jane Clemens cooked for both families in exchange for rent. For more on the Grant family see AMT 2: 590].
John Marshall Clemens led a civic group organizing a rail line from Hannibal to St. Joseph. The line was chartered and completed twelve years after his death.
March 14 Saturday – William P. Owsley, was acquitted of murdering Samuel Smarr by a Palmyra jury. [Wecter 108]. 
Summer – Cholera claimed 30 lives in Hannibal. Many fled the town [Wecter 213].
August – Hannibal slave dealer William Beebe sued and gained a judgment against John Marshall Clemens for $126.50 stemming from debts for the store [Wecter 112].
September 10 Thursday – John Marshall Clemens wrote to Buffum & Co., in New York concerning sale of the Tennessee Land. John had canceled the agency of Meredith & McCullough and gave “exclusive sale of my Tennessee lands for two years on the terms propose.—That you will be at the expense of agencies and advertising as in your letter mentioned; and will make sales as speedily and advantageously as possible” [MTBus 11]. Note: The Tennessee Land created a rift between Sam and Orion in later years, and hung around the family’s neck until the 1880s.
October 16 Friday – James Clemens, Jr. leased the Hill Street house to Orion Clemens for a period of 25 years at a rental of $28 per year [Hannibal Courier-Post, Mar. 6, 1935 p10b].
November – John Marshall Clemens chaired a citizens’ committee to promote a macadamized road between Hannibal and St. Joseph, Mo. [Wecter 110].
Henry La Cossitt, new to Hannibal, established the Democratic Gazette [Wecter 201]. Note: Wecter surmises that Sam Clemens was briefly an apprentice for the Gazette.
November 5 Thursday – Hannibal Gazette announced John Marshall Clemens’ candidacy for clerk of the circuit court in 1847’s election.
November 6 Thursday – County records show $8.25 for coffin Jimmy Finn, pauper, town drunk and model for Huck Finn’s Pap [Wecter 150].