Product Overview
Presenting fifty Abraham Lincoln storiessome familiar and beloved, some fresh and unexpectedLooking for Lincoln in Illinois: Lincolns Springfield is a carefully researched, richly illustrated guide to the Springfield, Illinois, locations on the Looking for Lincoln Story Trail. Created by the Looking for Lincoln Heritage Coalition, this trail consists of more than two hundred illustrated storyboards posted at sites of significance to Lincolns life and career across fifty-two communities in Illinois. The storyboards connect Lincoln-related tales to the geographical locations where they occurred, giving visitors, and now readers, a tour of the social and cultural landscape of Lincolns nineteenth-century world while revealing the very human Lincoln known by friends and associates.
This book celebrates the trail as a rich historical resource, featuring the original storyboards produced for Springfield and including twelve additional stories and more than 150 illustrations. Engaging stories in the book bring Lincolns Springfield to life: Lincoln created controversy with his Temperance Address, which he delivered in a church on Fourth Street in February 1842. He unexpectedly married Mary Todd in her sisters home on the edge of Springfield later that year. The Lincolns sons used to harness dogs and cats to small wagons and drive them around the dirt streets of town. When Lincoln visited his dentist, he applied his own chloroform, because the practice of analgesia was not yet common. He reportedly played the ball game Fives in a downtown alley while waiting for news of his presidential nomination. And boxing heavyweight champion John C. Heenan visited the presidential candidate in October 1860. Through texts, historic photographs and images, and maps, including one keyed to the story locations in downtown Springfield, readers of this fascinating volume are invited to imagine social and cultural landscapes that have been lost in time.
