HANNIBAL  , a

city of Marion county, Missouri, U.S.A., on the Mississippi river, about 12o m . N.W. of Saint Louis . Pop . (1890), 12,857 ; (1900), . 12,780, including 920 foreign-born and 1836 negroes; (191o) 18,341 . It is served by the Wabash, the Missouri, Kansas & Texas, the Chicago, Burlingtgn & Quincy, and the St Louis & Hannibal railways, and by boat lines to Saint Louis, Saint Paul and intermediate points . The business section is in the level bottom-lands of the river, while the residential portion spreads up the banks, which afford fine building sites with beautiful views . Mark Twain's boyhood was spent at Hannibal, which is the setting of Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer; Hannibal Cave, described in Tom Sawyer, extends for miles beneath the river and its bluffs . Hannibal has a good public library (1889; the first in Missouri); other prominent buildings are the Federal building, the court house, a city hospital and the high school . The river is here spanned by a long iron and steel bridge connecting with East Hannibal, Ill . Hannibal is the trade centre of a rich agricultural region, and has an important lumber trade, railway shops, and manufactories of lumber, shoes, stoves, flour, cigars, lime, Portland cement and pearl buttons (made from mussel shells); the value of the city's factory products increased from 10,698,72o in 1900 to $4,442,099 in 1905, or 64.6% . In the vicinity are valuable deposits of crinoid limestone, a coarse white building stone which takes a good polish .

The electric-

lighting plant is owned and operated by the municipality . Hannibal was laid out as a town in 1819 (its origin going back to Spanish land grants, which gave rise to much litigation) and was first chartered as a city in 1839 . The town of South Hannibal was annexed to it in 1843 .