City of Dust: A Cement Company Town in the Land of Tom SawyerMark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, often brings to mind romanticized images of Twain's fictional characters Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer exploring caves and fishing from the banks of the Mississippi River. In City of Dust, Gregg Andrews tells another story of the Hannibal area, the very real story of the exploitation and eventual destruction of Ilasco, Missouri. In 1901, the Atlas Portland Cement Company built a cement plant outside Hannibal.