(Editor’s note: This story is part of the Monitor’s summerlong series following old U.S. Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica, California.)
Park Ranger Joseph Tonjes is standing on the steps of Abraham Lincoln’s home, giving instructions to a group of about 20 visitors: Don’t touch the furniture. Stay inside the stanchions and ropes.
“But as we head up, please use this handrail,” Mr. Tonjes says. “It is the only original artifact that we want you to touch. Think of it like giving Abraham a handshake as you walk up.”
Why We Wrote This
Most Americans know Abraham Lincoln’s story. But the historical guides at his home come to know him on a deeper level, connecting with his principles of fairness and his rise from the ordinary.
He’s a relatively new ranger. He grew up on Long Island, New York, and graduated from Suffolk University in Boston a few years ago after majoring in history and philosophy. His father, a university professor, had summers off. “So we drove pretty much everywhere,” Mr. Tonjes says, and those family road trips through national parks planted the idea that the National Park Service was a place a history degree could take you – in his case: Springfield, Illinois.
“You learn about Lincoln, but then you kind of learn about the man room by room,” Mr. Tonjes says. It takes him off his pedestal, he says, and makes him more relatable.
The house sits just blocks from the old path of Route 66, the American road now marking its 100th year. And as the nation approaches its 250th birthday, Springfield offers a particular kind of encounter with Lincoln: not just the president who preserved the United States, but the self-taught lawyer whose political imagination, as he later said himself, could be traced back to the Declaration of Independence. Here, the founding ideals are not encountered first in marble or oratory, but in the rooms where Lincoln became the man who would carry them into the country’s most significant crisis.
Inside the home, Mr. Tonjes guides visitors through a version of Lincoln that can feel unexpectedly ordinary. There are stories about sons wrestling in the sitting room rough enough to tear their clothes. Lincoln arriving home late and bringing stray cats inside. A family mourning the death of a child in the front parlor. With its original doors and furniture, the rooms feel less like the birthplace of a national icon than the remnants of a life interrupted.
“A lot of other places kind of focus on who he is as the great president, the great emancipator,” Mr. Tonjes says after the tour. “But here it’s kind of like — this is where he is as a lawyer, in that in-between period when he really goes from a person from the Illinois frontier into the great figure we think of.”
Though new to the area, Mr. Tonjes realized that few American cities are so thoroughly organized around the memory of one person.
In Springfield, Lincoln’s name marks the airport, numerous schools, and a wide number of civic institutions. His home and his tomb anchor opposite ends of downtown. Across central Illinois, too, communities large and small have built markers, exhibits, and heritage programs around his life.
And with America’s 250th and the Route 66 centennial coinciding, many of those institutions are preparing for renewed attention as a lot more travelers move west along the old highway. So there are even more workers and volunteers telling the story of Lincoln’s life in Illinois from 1844 until 1861.
“Route 66 cuts diagonally down through our heritage area,” says Sarah Watson, CEO of the Looking for Lincoln Heritage Coalition, which manages the Abraham Lincoln National Heritage Area across 43 counties in Illinois. This June, her organization is launching a campaign called “Lincoln on 66.”
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor
Communities along that corridor – Pontiac, Atlanta, Lincoln, Litchfield – already draw travelers for the mythology of the road. The goal is to invite them into another American story while they are there.
“The Illinois story is really that story of – who’s that man?” Ms. Watson says. “Who’s that bumpkin who had one year of formal education and became our president?”
“Ordinary person…extraordinary thing”
Herb Higgs once lived three blocks south of the Lincoln home, on Cook Street. He left Springfield as a young man for a career in agricultural fair management – nearly two decades at the Illinois State Fair, five years running a fair in Michigan, and then 13 years managing the South Plains Fair in Lubbock, Texas. He retired in 2017 and came home.
“I wasn’t a big Abraham Lincoln buff by any means, and the Civil War never attracted my attention,” says Mr. Higgs, who’s been volunteering here for nearly four years. “But it’s extremely interesting to learn a little bit every time I come to work.”
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor
He has come to appreciate the work of the rangers alongside him – young people who have given themselves to keeping Lincoln’s legacy alive. “Lincoln has been canonized in many respects,” Mr. Higgs says. “He was an ordinary person who wound up doing an extraordinary thing.”
Next to Mr. Higgs, Park Ranger Danny Guttas is swearing in a group of four young people who have completed the activities to become Junior Rangers. They raise their right arms and recite after him: “As a Junior Ranger, I promise to explore, protect, and learn about the national parks.”
Mr. Guttas grew up in Springfield and has been a park ranger here for about six years. He is very enthusiastic about how his city preserves the memory of how complicated Lincoln was.
“I really resonate with Lincoln’s commitment to this idea of equality of opportunity,” Mr. Guttas says. “He didn’t think it was fair for anybody to work hard and put in a lot of sweat and energy and time and effort to do some kind of job but not get compensated for that, not get rewarded, and not have the opportunity to advance.”
Mr. Guttas doesn’t put this into the context of Lincoln’s antislavery positions, but his admiration highlights the fact that rather than grounding his opposition in higher moral or religious terms, Lincoln opposed slavery because it violated the labor-reward principle.
Harry Bruinius/The Christian Science Monitor
“That theme of everybody being able to get the rewards for the work that they put in – that are bettering themselves in their communities – is what Lincoln’s biggest inspiration to me would be.”
Staying true to principles
A few blocks north, the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum draws its own devoted circle. Since the museum opened in 2005, its volunteer program has grown to nearly 600 people – 593 at last count, who log roughly 35,000 hours a year, according to Jeremy Carrell, the director of volunteer services who has been there since opening day.
Richard Schuldt has been among them for 12 1/2 years. He arrived in Springfield four decades ago – longer, he is quick to note, than Lincoln himself lived here. He taught American government at local colleges, and eventually spent nearly three decades directing survey research at the University of Illinois Springfield.
He finds in Lincoln what a lifetime in civics prepared him to find: a politician who held to principle under pressure. His touchstone is a speech Lincoln gave at Independence Hall in Philadelphia in February 1861, on his way to Washington for his inauguration.
“He’s a politician, a pragmatist, but he also had principles,” Mr. Schuldt says. “And while he had to maneuver political winds, he always stayed true to those principles. And I think an appropriate quote, particularly for this year, he said, ‘I never had a feeling politically I could not trace back to the sentiments in the American Declaration of Independence.’”
What keeps him coming back, he says, is the visitors – people who arrive from across the country and around the world, some of them knowing Lincoln deeply, others encountering the full story for the first time.
Becky Pruitt has also been volunteering at the museum for 12 years – though her connection to Lincoln reaches further back than that.
She grew up in Decatur, about 40 miles east, in the region Lincoln traveled as a young lawyer riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit, she says. Her father’s family came from the same rural, remote part of Kentucky where Lincoln was born. And she spent her career as an attorney in the Illinois Attorney General’s office.
After she retired, she came straight to the museum – she had already arranged her volunteer training before her last day of work.
In retirement, she audited a course taught by the Lincoln biographer Michael Burlingame at the University of Illinois Springfield. Along with the fact that Lincoln was self-taught, she says, she admires another quality that does not appear on monuments.
“He did not hold grudges,” Ms. Pruitt says. “He did not try to get back at his enemies, ever. In fact, he would bring them in and welcome them to work with him. And these are qualities that serve us as a country well, serve us in government well.”
She pauses. “If we could just have more of that, I think we’d be in better shape today.”