The story
National Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal
National Tom Sawyer Days is a Fourth of July weekend festival in Hannibal, Missouri, Mark Twain's boyhood hometown, organized by the Hannibal Jaycees since 1956. The event centers on contests drawn from Twain's novels, including fence painting and frog jumping, alongside a parade, fireworks, and a 10-kilometer run along the Mississippi River.
Hannibal, Missouri, sits on the banks of the Mississippi River in the northeastern part of the state, and it holds an outsized place in American literature as the boyhood home of Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain and drew on his Hannibal childhood to create the fictional town of St.