Jane Clemens

Clemens, Jane Lampton (1803–1890)

brief biography

From Mark Twain Project

Samuel Clemens mother was born in Adair County, Kentucky. In 1823 she married John Marshall Clemens, in part to spite a former suitor. The couple had seven children, of whom only four (Orion, Pamela, Samuel, and Henry) survived at the time of John Marshall Clemens’s death in 1847. The widowed Jane left Hannibal, Missouri, and between 1853 and 1870 lived in Muscatine, and possibly Keokuk, Iowa, and in St. Louis, Missouri, initially as part of Orion Clemens’s household and then with her daughter Pamela Moffett. After SLC married and settled in Buffalo, New York, in 1870, Jane set up house in nearby Fredonia, with the widowed Pamela. In 1882 she moved to Keokuk, Iowa, where she lived with Orion for the rest of her life. She was buried in Hannibal’s Mount Olivet Cemetery, alongside her husband and her son Henry.

In an autobiographical sketch written in 1897 or 1898, SLC commented that his mother had “come handy to me several times in my books, where she figures as Tom Sawyer’s ‘Aunt Polly.’” Her Hannibal pastor called her “a woman of the sunniest temperament, lively, affable, a general favorite.”

SLC wrote about her at length in “Jane Lampton Clemens” (1890).

https://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=21750&ref=acom