Florida, Missouri, was a small settlement of about 60 families and several businesses, with two short streets and lanes bordered by rail fences and cornfields, and it reached its zenith before the Civil War. One of its general stores was briefly owned by John Marshall Clemens, Mark Twain's father. The town remained small because the Salt River was never navigable for steamboats, railroad companies were not interested in building a line to the village, and the community was relatively isolated from large towns. Late in June 1835, John Marshall Clemens and his wife Jane arrived in Florida from Pall Mall, Tennessee, with their children Orion, Pamela, Margaret, Benjamin, and a slave girl named Jenny, making the long journey by riverboat and wagon at the urging of Jane's brother-in-law, John Charles Quarles. After arriving, John Clemens rented the two-room frame house where Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born two months premature that November. Buried in the Florida Cemetery are Mark Twain's sister Margaret, his uncle John Quarles, his aunt Patsy, and Dr. Thomas Chowning, who delivered young Sam, while his grandfather Benjamin Lampton is buried behind the one-room schoolhouse in town. Florida is remembered as the birth town of one of America's most famous authors, and the cabin in which Samuel Clemens was born can be seen at the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Site.