Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835.
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An adventurer and a wily intellectual, Mark Twain is perhaps most famous for his classic American novels, including 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'.
Mark Twain arrived in Stawell, a railway changing station between Adelaide and Melbourne, some 40 miles from Horsham, on Friday October 18 1895.
In his book 'At Home Abroad' he wrote that he was met by Mayor Menzies and other dignitaries.
The rest of his travelling party was taken to the Commercial Hotel and he was met at the Town Hall by the Minister of Mines for the colony.
That night, a large number of local residents greeted Twain at a reception at the Town Hall. At four shillings a head for a reserved seat, the people felt they got their money's worth.
Twain told stories of his books and his experiences in life while the audience convulsed with laughter at his character and way-down-in-the-Mississippi-Valley drawl.
On Saturday morning, the Mayor, the Minister of Mines, district parliamentarians and others showed Twain and his travelling party the countryside between Stawell and Great Western before being entertained at the vineyards of Mr and Mrs Hans Irvine.
There they saw 120,000 bottles of champagne stored in the underground granite cellars.
At the time the Colony of Victoria's population of one million was said to drink 25 million bottles of champagne per year.
Twain was also impressed with half-a-peck of surface gold and a couple of gold bricks worth 7500 pounds apiece. He also spoke with a lady who has an income of 75,000 pounds a month from her gold mine.
On his way back to Stawell he recorded favourable opinions of the cloud-flecked brilliant sunshine, dry heat, coppery gum trees and rock formations near Stawell.
These rock formations, the Sisters Rocks, he described as "noble boulders". Possibly from an early ice drift he believed, as they were on high ground and could not have rolled there.
One of them has the size and sphericity of a balloon of the biggest pattern.
The road to these rocks led through a forest of great gum trees, lean and scraggy and sorrowful. Along this road toiled occasional freight wagons drawn by long double files of oxen on their journey of 200 miles in successful opposition to the railway.
Mark Twain left Stawell on Saturday on the afternoon train for Ballarat, 24 hours after arriving.
He passed away on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut and is buried in Elmira, New York.
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