Our first destination in Springfield is the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, which opened in 2005. We visited the Lincoln house in Springfield on our way to Chicago in the summer of 1998, but we hadn't been back since the Museum was built.
This 31-foot-tall statue of Abraham Lincoln and the somewhat shorter "Rando Man" (not the official name) arrived in Springfield only 9 days before we did. Both statues were created by John Seward Johnson.
It looks to me like Rando Man is holding a map and asking for directions (Where does he want to go? Can't he think of something else to ask Lincoln other than directions to some other place? Why is he so focused on Lincoln's hat?)
According to the
State Journal Record, Rando Man is holding the Gettysburg Address. The paper also says the statues will remain here for a year and four months.
Some of Johnson's work appeals to me, but I'm not a fan of this particular one.
The Lincolns don't look as real as I'd like them to (especially the boys). But here endeth my criticism of the Lincoln Museum experience, which was one of the highlights of the trip for me.
Mari and Pablo talked with "
Mary Bowser," a former slave who worked as a Union spy in the home of Jefferson Davis. Behind them, sitting on a stump with a book, is young Lincoln.
Inside Lincoln's cabin, Abe is reading by the firelight. The Lincolns moved to Indiana in 1816, when Lincoln was 7 years old. It was a Brady-Bunch situation after his mom died in 1818 and his father re-married a little more than a year later.
Not long after we walked into the museum, a couple of greeters offered scavenger hunt clipboards to the kids. Pablo and Emilio took them and soon disappeared.
Meanwhile, I made my way more slowly through a series of rooms, like the firelight cabin, that illustrated different periods in Lincoln's lifestory. Each room includes a wax figure of Lincoln interacting with other significant characters. These rooms included:
- a slave auction of the kind Lincoln might have witnessed in New Orleans on his first trip there as a 21-year-old ferryman in 1828;
- the unsuccessful Berry-Lincoln General Store in New Salem, Illinois, where Lincoln experienced a roller coaster of ups and downs between 1831 to 1837. While Lincoln lived in New Salem, he served as a captain in the Black Hawk War in 1832 (but fought no battles), finished 8th of 13 candidates for a position in the Illinois General Assembly (also in 1832), was successfully elected to the Assembly in 1834, and lost his first love to an untimely death in 1835. Lincoln moved in Springfield in 1837, two years before William Ferrell, my great-grandfather's grandfather, then 49-years-old moved to Illinois from Kentucky to join his two oldest sons, William and Hezekiah. Interestingly, New Salem essentially ceased to exist by 1840, three years after Lincoln went to Springfield,
- Lincoln's messy law office in Springfield, where, apparently his boys were allowed to run wild.
The "Pre-Presidential" wing of the Museum also includes a contemporary television news control room, featuring Tim Russert hosting a 21st-Century-style television news broadcast about the 4-way presidential election of 1860. As the museum website explains, "On nine control room monitors, campaign ads using period settings and authentic campaign strategies are analyzed. There are commercials for each of the four candidates – Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell – with their actual campaign platforms spun into the political terminology and sound-bites of today." Lincoln won by dominating the electoral college in the North, though only 40% of the popular vote went his way. Stephen Douglas won 30% of the popular vote, but only carried a single state.
After visiting the Pre-Presidential wing, we caught a screening of "Lincoln's Eyes" in the Union Theatre. It was narrated by an artist (think David Attenborough in Jurassic Park) and had some hoky elements, but I liked it better than a similar, somewhat dated "4-D" experience I had at the World War II museum in New Orleans. The chairs shake when a Civil War bomb "explodes."
The White House wing of the Museum was focused almost entirely on the harsh criticism leveled against Lincoln during most of his Presidential term. The editorial cartoons were brutal. The depiction of a nation in which about half of the voting public reviles the occupant of the White House was not unfamiliar to me, although my feelings of sympathy for the target of the revulsion was.
One room depicts the bedroom in the White House where Lincoln's son Willie died (he was 12-about the age of our boys).
The principal focus eventually narrows in on the Emancipation Proclamation, the first draft of which Lincoln presented to his cabinet after they had discussed other business on July 22, 1862--an occasion that is depicted in the scene below.
Reviews were mixed. Secretary of State William Seward advised that Lincoln wait to issue it until after a Union battlefield victory. Otherwise, it would look desperate.
One of my favorite parts of this Museum is the "Illusion Corridor," which features a gauntlet of hologram-like images of faces shouting "advice" to Lincoln about the Emancipation Proclamation. According to the Museum's website, the shouters' words were taken from historical writings. I agreed with those who felt the Proclamation, which left slavery intact in the border states still in the Union, did not go far enough.
Lincoln eventually waited to release the Proclamation until five days after McLellan defeated Lee at Antietam (Sharpsburg, Maryland) on September 17--one of the bloodiest days in U.S. history (22,000 dead, wounding or missing).
The remaining rooms of The White House Years include a box in Ford's Theatre (John Wilkes Booth is at the door), and the Representatives Hall in Springfield's Old State Capitol, where Lincoln's body lay in a closed casket state after his assassination. It was moving.
The last room in the wing included a 4-minute video depicting the progress of the War and the 750,000 soldiers it killed.
When we left the White House Years, we visited the "Holavision Theatre" in the Presidential Library and watched an actor playing a librarian performing behind a glass screen that covered the front of the stage. Special effects make it appear that the librarian is able to control smoke and vapors and shape them into ghostly objects that he interacts with. His message is that libraries are filled with secrets capable of transporting us to the past. Up until the finale, the illusion was, perhaps, 95% spot-on. The end of the performance, though, was both surprising and truly magical. I won't reveal what happens. It is worth experiencing first hand. I'm glad we did.
On our way out, Nina took a photo with Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became a charismatic leader of the abolitionist movement. Her birthname was Isabella Bomfree, but she chose the name "Sojourner Truth" for herself. She believed that God had called on her to preach the truth. In 1864, when she was 67 years old, she was invited to meet with Lincoln. She made a living on sales from her autobiography, which she dictated to Olive Gilbert since she never learned to read or write herself.
Sojourner Truth challenged prevailing notions of racial and gender inferiority and inequality and ultimately split with Frederick Douglas because he believed formerly enslaved men should be given the right to vote before any women should.
By displaying her in a seated position, the Museum missed an opportunity to convey what a striking person she was at nearly six feet tall.
Lincoln Logs were invented in 1916 by 24-year-old John Lloyd Wright, son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
When we left the Museum, we walked down S. 8th street to Mr. Lincoln's neighborhood. Lincoln used to own the house Nina is walking by (but he never lived there).
No cars are allowed in Lincoln's neighborhood.
Lincoln was living in this house in Springfield when he was elected president in 1860. He and Mary Todd moved there in 1844, two years after getting married.
After lunch at Saputo's Italian restaurant, we headed to our next destination: Hannibal, Missouri.
After checking in to the hotel, we walked 2 blocks to the house where Samuel Clemens ("Mark Twain") lived between 1844 and 1853. He was 9 years old when his family moved in, and he remained in the house until June 1853, when, as an 18-year-old, he "disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis" to seek his fortune.
When Clemens returned to Hannibal to visit in 1902, he told no one in advance of his coming. He checked in to a hotel, visited his old house on Hill street the next day, and then visited the cemetery where his mother, his father, and his brothers Orion and Henry are buried.
The Friday following his return to Hannibal, he had dinner with Laura Frazier Hawkins, who had been his sweetheart 52 years before (she was the inspiration for Becky Thatcher).
He stayed in town a few days more, took a train to Columbia, and never returned.
As we headed to the banks of the Mississippi River, a police officer told us to avoid the part of the levee that was not topped by a sidewalk as they didn't want its structural integrity to be compromised in any way. You can see that when we made it to the sidewalk, we could see how the river had covered the playground and the railroad tracks at the river's edge.
According to the
Hannibal Courier-Post, earlier in the day, between 50 and 60 student-athletes from the Hannibal School District turned out earlier in the day to help fill sandbags that they then moved to the top of the levee.
On Thursday morning, the river was supposed to reach a projected record crest of 30.7 feet, but after reaching 29.48 feet Thursday afternoon, it suddenly dropped, possibly due to levee breaks further up river in Eastern Lewis county.
In the photo above, you can see how much lower the levee-side streets of Hannibal are than the River.
Moments after the photo above was taken, Nina and Pablo were submerged in water.
Fortunately, it was back in the hotel, while Emi watched game one of the NBA Finals between Toronto and Golden State (Toronto won). Mari picked up take out from the Mark Twain Dinette across the street, and I started reading about how the levee 15 miles upriver had broken and how the city of West Quincy, Missouri was being evacuated.
Sam used to sneak out that bedroom window when he was a boy.
The Mark Twain Museum property also includes an "Interactive Center," which is several blocks away. It includes a Mississippi river raft that seems to float on the floor. You can sit on it and watch a scene from one of the movie adaptations of the film. You can also sit in a stagecoach of the kind Clemens might have ridden in at some point in his travels heading west.
The Clemens family left Kentucky in April 1835 and headed to the tiny hamlet of Florida, Missouri, where they arrived in June 1835. Sam, the fourth of their five children, was born in the building above on November 30th of that year. He was two months premature and was not expected to live.
According to the biography of Clemens I've been reading since we got to Hannibal, "Florida was small, poor, and doomed." 150 years later, Florida disappeared "beneath a man-damned recreational liquefaction, a venue for water-skiers labeled, by some . . . Mark Twain Lake. The hut in which Sam Clemens was born [above] had been scooped up and stored on high ground, [and] covered with an all-weather capsule." The "capsule" can just be made out in the top picture.
For much of the ride to Kansas City, we traveled on small country roads and played Bluegrass music on the CD player, while Pablo let out his inner puppy.
