18-04-2025
Today in history: 1868, Mark Twain lectures in Marysville
On Saturday night, April 18, 1868, residents of Yuba and Sutter counties had an opportunity to attend a comedy show disguised as a lecture performed by one Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain.
Mark Twain never wrote for a newspaper in Marysville, despite many claims that he did. The legend persisted for many decades, without any proof, that a desk at a former location of The Appeal-Democrat was once occupied by Twain, but biographies about Twain that mention his work at other Northern California newspapers are silent about Marysville newspapers.
Those same biographies discuss his lecture series throughout the country, including swings through the American west. He is known to have visited the city twice in the 1860s, both times to perform.
In 1868, three years after his short story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,' and eight years before publishing 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer', 33-year-old Twain appeared at the Marysville Theater, located on the east side of D Street between First and Second streets.
The D Street Theater was a stop for popular acts playing the west coast, located on the rail line between San Francisco and Portland.
An ad in the Marysville Daily Appeal described Twain's 1868 lecture in Marysville as being on 'Pilgrim Life…a sketch of his notorious voyage to Europe, Palestine, etc., on board the steamship Quaker City.'
The edition of the Daily Appeal following Twain's performance had took only perfunctory notice of the appearance.
'Mark Twain was the observed of all observers on Saturday,' it noted in a column of items that included reports of downed fences and the numbers of farmers and teams of mules coming and going from wholesale houses.
Twain was impressed with the Marysville he visited. In his words, 'This is the most generally well built town in California—nothing in it, hardly, but fine, substantial brick houses. I found there many a man who had made his fortune in Washoe, and didn't have the shrewdness to hold on to it, and so had wandered back to his old Marysville home. It is a pity to see such a town as this go down, but the citizens say the railroads are sapping its trade and killing it. They are a sociable, cheerful-spirited community, and if the town should die, they would hardly die with it.'
