Born in Georgetown, Kentucky, Laura Hawkins was only a few years old when her family moved to Hannibal, Missouri, where they lived in a two-story frame house on Hill Street, across from the Clemenses. She and SLC were childhood playmates, classmates, and sweethearts. Laura Hawkins attended Van Rensselaer Presbyterial Academy in Rensselaer, Missouri, and in 1858 married James W. Frazer (1833–75), a physician, with whom she had two sons. In 1895 she became the matron of a Hannibal home for orphans and the indigent; SLC visited with her in Hannibal in 1902 and in Redding, Connecticut, in 1908. He portrayed her as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and used her name for one of the principal characters in The Gilded Age.