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21. Decatur

Abraham Lincoln and Decatur, Illinois

		Imagine crossing from Indiana to Illinois over the Wabash River. The season was late winter of 1830, and Abraham Lincoln was 21 years old. He helped his father, Thomas, move the family from Lincoln City, Indiana to Decatur, Illinois.

(photographs by Deb DeLion)

The nation’s 16th President first laid eyes on Decatur in March of 1830 at the age of 21. Throughout the next three decades, the future President of the United States and the young city of Decatur would continually intersect. Decatur ultimately played a pivotal role in Lincoln’s political destiny. The Lincoln Trail Homestead is the location of the first Lincoln family settlement in Illinois. Thomas Lincoln, his wife, step-son, two step-daughters and their husbands and children, along with young Abraham, lived in that location approximately twelve months. After an arduous winter of 1830-31, and illness in the family, Thomas Lincoln moved his family to Coles County, to the area now known as the Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site. Abraham did not accompany them, but remained in central Illinois to make his own way, and the rest, as they say, is history (and geography!).

Visit the Decatur Area Convention & Visitors Bureau at http://www.experiencedecatur.com/abrahamlincoln.php to discover more details about the area. The website highlights fourteen significant sites throughout the Decatur/Forsyth communities.

On the first day of March in 1830, Thomas Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln’s father, sold his squatter’s claims in Spencer County, Indiana and started out for Illinois.

Abraham Lincoln was 21 at the time, and drove one of the teams of oxen pulling one of the wagons containing the family’s personal effects, on a two hundred mile journey to Macon County, Illinois. The arduous, muddy journey, took the thirteen family members fifteen days. (Today, a moving van could make the journey in about 4 – 5 hours). They arrived at a spot on the north side of the Sangamon River, ten miles southwest of downtown Decatur, in what is now known as Harristown Township. There, where the timberland and prairie met on the banks of the river, Abraham Lincoln helped his father erect a log cabin where the large, extended family settled comfortably. When the cabin and the outbuildings were completed, the young Abraham Lincoln helped to split enough rails to fence off a 10-acre area of the homestead. He then broke the ground, and planted the family’s first corn crop in Illinois. When he finished these familial duties, he expressed to his family his intention to set out and make his own fortune.
 
He did not, however, leave Decatur immediately that first summer. He remained in the immediate area, breaking up land with teams of oxen for other settlers, helping them to put in crops, splitting rails and chopping wood as a hired man.

In March of 1831, as his father and the rest of the family were relocating to Coles County, Abraham Lincoln, along with his cousin John Hanks and his step-brother, John D. Johnson, struck out for Springfield. After spending about six months building a flatboat and piloting it to New Orleans for Denton Offutt, Abraham Lincoln settled in the New Salem area and began working at Offutt’s mercantile there. While residing in that area, he served in the Illinois militia, purchased a mercantile of his own, worked as a surveyor, and served in the Illinois legislature, before becoming a practicing attorney in 1837 and subsequently moving to Springfield. From that point the political history of Lincoln as an attorney, legislator, congressman and eventually President is well-known by all Americans.

The Lincoln family cabin from the homestead near Harristown in Macon County stood where it had been erected until 1876. At that time it was dismantled and taken to Philadelphia for the nation’s centennial celebration, where it was reassembled and viewed by thousands of people during the great exposition. 
(taken from the Decatur Area Convention & Visitors Bureau)

		Looking onto the Sangamon River from the Lincoln family original homestead in Decatur, Illinois.
Looking toward the cabin site from the bluff overlooking the Sangamon River.	Site of the original Lincoln log cabin, 1830.	Memorial recognizing Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in Decatur at the age of 21.
Memorial recognizing Abraham Lincoln’s Stump Speech

(photographs by Kathleen Jensen)

Decatur is the largest city and the county seat of Macon County in Illinois. The city, sometimes called “the Soybean Capital of the World,” was founded in 1823 and is located along the Sangamon River and Lake Decatur in Central Illinois. (Wikipedia)