Land of Lincoln

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June 17th 2011

Published: March 11th 2012

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Lincoln Home

Abraham Lincoln's house in Springfield Illinois

For tourists, Springfield Illinois means seeing two things, Abraham Lincoln and Route 66.

Unbelievably, they are related.

The original path of route 66 goes only a block from the main Abraham Lincoln attractions, so they were major stops during the road’s heyday.

I saw the Abraham Lincoln Home first.

Abraham Lincoln National Historic Site

This National Historic Site centers on the house that Lincoln owned while living in Springfield and the surrounding neighborhood.

In an amazing feat of historic preservation, virtually every building on these three blocks is original.

The streets have been blocked off and converted back to dirt, so the area is remarkably accurate to the period.

My initial reaction was that I was back in a recreation like Greenfield Village (see These Are the Times of Our Lives), but this is the real thing.

The first part of the site contains a museum on Lincoln’s adult life (for his childhood, see Racing Insanity).

It starts when he moved to Illinois at age 21.

At the time, he was a journeyman farmer and carpenter.

He made pocket money by splitting logs for fence rails; hence the name he later used on the campaign trail, the “rallsplitter”.

Abraham Lincoln's Bedroom

The room where a future President slept. The bed is a reproduction.

At night, he read every book he could get his hands on.

Many of them were law books.

At the time, one could get a law license just by passing the bar exam, which Lincoln did three years later.

He became a very successful lawyer, ultimately earning around $200,000 a year in today’s dollars.

Equally important, during this period he met and courted the daughter of a Kentucky plantation owner, Mary Todd.

He needed eight years before her father finally consented to the marriage.

Then as now, wealthy lawyers were involved in politics.

Lincoln ran for State Representative in 1834 as a Whig, and won.

He served for five years.

In 1858, he ran for US Senator against Stephen Douglas.

This campaign produces the famous series of Lincoln-Douglas debates over the slavery issue.

Douglas kept his seat, but Lincoln learned a great deal about running a large scale campaign.

This came in very handy during his run for President two years later.

He had a daring strategy.

Abolitionists in the new Republican Party were divided between two different candidates.

Lincoln presented himself as a

Lincoln's neighborhood

The street where Abraham Lincoln lived, beautifully restored. Note the carts, reproductions of those used during Lincoln's presidential campaign.

compromise, and won the nomination.

In the general election, he won Springfield, lost the county, and won the state.

The museum ends with the speech that he gave at the train station before leaving for Washington DC.

It was the last time he ever saw Springfield.

The tour of Lincoln’s house comes after the museum.

Tours are given by rangers.

The house looks surprisingly plain compared to many I have seen from the period, including plantation houses (see Southern Nostalgia), but it’s important to remember that Springfield was still the frontier at the time.

All building material was either obtained locally or brought in by train.

Lincoln’s relative wealth shows mostly by its size, which was one of the largest houses in town at the time.

(Compare this with Historic Stagville, (see Legacies) which had many of the same issues.)

The tour starts in the parlor, which was the most important public room in the house.

It features relatively luxurious furniture.

The wallpaper has a bird pattern.

Mary Todd Lincoln picked it out, and she apparently liked birds.

They reappear elsewhere in the house.

Lincolon Mausoleum

The monument above Abraham Lincoln's grave in Springfield Illinois

After the parlor is the relatively plain dining room.

The furniture here is original to the house.

The last notable room on the first floor is Lincoln’s private living room.

He was in this room when he got word of the election results.

Upstairs holds a series of bedrooms.

As was custom at the time, Abraham and Mary had separate rooms.

Abraham Lincoln’s contains a small desk, where he did most of his legal work and wrote his speeches.

The desk is not original; it is way too short for one thing.

The Park Service deserves some kudos for their commitment to historic accuracy.

Both rooms contain a chair like contraption with a trap door.

It is what people used in the days before indoor plumbing.

A servant had the unpleasant job of emptying it daily.

I can only imagine how the rangers handle questions about that one from school groups!

After Lincoln’s house, I wandered around the block.

Signs note who lived in which house, to the best people know.

The area

Lincoln Statue

Statue of Lincoln's head outside his tomb. Note the nose, yellow from generations of visitors rubbing it.

was fairly desirable at the time.

One of Lincoln’s neighbors was a dentist, and another was the county sheriff.

The street has a large wagon with what looks like a log cabin on top.

It is a replica of a cart Lincoln’s supporters carried from town to town during the presidential campaign.

The log cabin represented Lincoln’s humble beginnings in Kentucky.

Finally, a model of an old fashioned camera is positioned across from Lincoln’s house.

This symbolizes the mourners, tourists, and curious who have made pilgrimages to this house almost from the day Lincoln was shot.

Lincoln Mausoleum

After Lincoln was assassinated, his body was brought back to Springfield and buried in the local cemetery.

In the 1890s, a local group raised the funds to erect a proper mausoleum.

Like many Springfield visitors, I went to see it.

The mausoleum is underneath a huge monument containing statues of Civil War battles.

The centerpiece is a statue of Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation.

A bronze statue of his head stands in front.

So many people have touched it over the years that the entire front is yellow.

Lincoln's Tomb

Lincoln's grave within the monument.

Inside the mausoleum, a marble corridor leads past copies of famous Lincoln statues (including the one in the Lincoln Memorial).

It ends at a large marble gravestone that reads “Lincoln”.

An array of flags flies behind it.

Abraham Lincoln’s wife and three of his children are interred in vaults next to the gravestone.

Shea's Service Station

As noted earlier, the Lincoln sites are along the original route for Route 66.

This road may be the most celebrated two lane road in American history.

At first glance, it’s hard to see why.

It was not the first long route to be paved (that honor belongs to the Lincoln Highway, now part of US 30 and US 40), and it does not run from coast to coast.

It DOES run through much classic American scenery, and it was used by many migrants during the Depression in the 1930s.

For many reasons, it became the classic American road trip road, and its fame has only spread after it was completely replaced by interstates in the 1960s and 1970s.

Route 66 is a trip through nostalgia.

In Illinois, that

A Route 66 original

Bill Shea, surrounded by his life's work

nostalgia is celebrated at Shea’s Service Station.

Bill Shea opened the station on Route 66 in Springfield in 1948.

It closed as a station in the 1970s.

Since then, he has turned it into a storehouse of route 66 and early auto travel memorabilia.

Not only does it celebrate travel on the old road, it is very much a kin of the attractions found on the old road that made it such an adventure.

The amounts of items contained in this museum are nearly unbelievable.

For starters, it has the expected old maps, advertising posters, highway signs, and hundreds of postcards.

Bill also has old freezers that were used to hold food to sell to travelers, and a soda machine from the 1940s.

He has a collection of oil cans used to maintain cars.

He has a collection of old mechanics tools.

His museum has three gas pumps, including one from the 1920s with a clear cylinder so the customer could inspect the gas before putting it in their car.

A sign on this one notes that gas was seventeen cents a gallon at the time.

For forty years,

Three generations of gas pumps

Three gas pumps from different decades at Shea's Service Station: 1940s, 1910s, and 1920s respectively.

the Burma Shave company ran a famous campaign of series of billboards along major roads.

Each one had a line of a humorous rhyming poem that promoted the product.

The museum has promotional items they produced (such as a shaving mirror) that referenced the campaign.

Don’t miss the bumper stickers, many with bad puns of all sorts.

Talking to Bill will produce a dozen stories of the old road and the early days of auto travel.

Anyone with an interest in road trip history (especially on a road trip!) needs to pay a visit.

Route 66 Paved in Bricks

After the museum, I went to see the most significant part of Route 66 in Illinois.

When the road was originally created, it was mostly paved in bricks.

This was standard practice at the time.

Only one section remains, near Springfield.

Thanks to road realignments over the years, it is now a fairly obscure side street outside a fairly small town.

To find it, take state route 4 south of Springfield toward Aurora, and look for the ‘Historic 66 route’ sign pointing off the road.

The bricks start immediately afterward.

The road runs between

Nostalgic Vending

A blast from road trips past: a 1940s soda machine, next to a candy counter (on the right) from the same era

fields.

Since it is not used often, grass grows between the bricks in places.

I found it all evocative of long ago road trips.

After Springfield, I had a long drive into northern Missouri.

If the drive in northern Illinois was bad in the scenery department, this drive was worse.

More fields and fewer hills, to the point things became monotonous.

The road did have one highlight.

The Illinois River flows at the base of a long bluff, which is high for these parts.

Since the river is a major navigation channel, the road crossed on a soaring bridge right to the top of the bluff.

I saw actual hills!

After that, it was straight back to monotony, until I reached the Mississippi River.

This river also flows between high bluffs, and I saw them long before I reached them.

I have crossed the Mississippi before on this trip (see Holiday Tourists), but this one is special.

The crossing marks the point I move from East to West.

I will not see the river again until the trip is

Get your kicks on route 66 bricks

The restored section of original route 66 pavement, bricks. This stretch of road is now pretty lonely. Note the grass growing in the bricks on the left.

nearly over.

I wanted a special place to mark the occasion.

I ultimately chose the Mark Twain Bridge in Hannibal Missouri, since his stories were my first introduction to the romance of the Mississippi.

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