Twain delighted to have "Squire Hawkins" sit upon "the pyramid of large
blocks called the stile, in front of his home, contemplating the
morning." But John M. Clemens had his practical side, and the
specifications for the first jail for Fentress county, drawn by Clemens
and in his own handwriting made part of the county's records in 1827,
show a very substantial strain:
"To wit, for a jail, a house of logs hewed a foot square, twelve feet in
the clear, two stories high, and this surrounded by another wall
precisely of the same description, with a space between the two walls of
about eight or ten inches, and that space filled completely with skinned
hickory poles, the ground floor to be formed of sills hewed about a foot
square and laid closely .... the logs to extend through the inner wall
of the building"--etc.
And that jail was standing serviceable and strong until a few years ago
when the prosperity of Fentress county called for an edifice of red
stone.
Clemens and Pile remained friends and competitive land owners until
"with an activity and a suddenness that bewildered Obedstown and almost
took away its breath, the Hawkinses hurried through their arrangements
in four short months and flitted out into the great mysterious blank
that lay beyond the Knobs of Tennessee"--to Missouri, where a few months
afterward "Mark Twain" was born.
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