What do TomSawyer and JumpingFrogs have in common?Stories about both of them were created by one man:Mark Twain. Twain was four years old when his family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, located on the west bank of the Mississippi. Twain grew up there and was fascinated with life along the river—the steamboats, the giant lumber rafts, and the people who worked on them.
TheCelebratedJumpingFrogofCalaverasCounty is one of Twain's best loved short stories, and TheAdventuresofTomSawyer is one of his most famous novels. Both these works are celebrated by events held during National Tom Sawyer Days, which originated in the late 1950s and became national in the 1960s. Children enter their frogs in the jumping contest during National Tom Sawyer Days. There's also a fence painting contest to see who can paint the fastest. The idea for this contest comes from a scene in TomSawyer, in which Tom has been told to paint the fence in front of the house he lives in. It's a beautiful day, and he would rather be doing anything else. As his friends walk by, he makes them believe that it's fun to paint, and they join in the "fun". By the end of the day, the fence has three coats of paint!
Although the story of Tom Sawyer is a fiction, it's based on facts. If you go to Hannibal, you'll see the white fence, which still stands at Twain's boyhood home.
