Friday, February 20, 2009 9:25 PM CST
Book on Lincoln farm looks at father-son relationship
By DAVE FOPAY, Staff Writer
dfopay@jg-tc.com
LERNA -- Kurt Peterson wrote a book on the history of Coles County farmland Abraham Lincoln once owned, but he thinks it really shows Lincoln’s “very complicated” relationship with his father and how he was connected to his family.
Peterson is a history professor at North Park University in Chicago, and the new owner of the land commissioned him to do the book. The book is now available for sale, and is also free to people who purchase a deed to a small portion of the land.
Lincoln bought the land for $2,000 in 1841 from his money-strapped father Thomas, who bought it a year earlier for $50, Peterson noted. Lincoln let his father continue farming the land after he bought it.
“It was purely an act of dedication, of love for his family,” Peterson said. “Clearly, what he was doing was coming to his parents’ financial rescue.”
The book, “Lincoln’s Land: the History of Abraham Lincoln’s Coles County Farm,” sells for $7.99 plus shipping and handling. It can be ordered on-line at www.lincolnfamilyfarm.com/book or by phone by calling 1-888-OWN-FARM.
In 2007, Rockford business man Dan Arnold bought four acres of the farmland in southern Coles County near Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site, the site of Thomas Lincoln’s home. Arnold has said he plans to use the site to promote Lincoln’s history and any profits from the endeavor will to go charity or to promote tourism.
The cost of the deeds was recently reduced from $95 to $49.99, and during February they’re being sold for $19.99, said Dale Parson, spokesman for Arnold’s company. The company also plans to begin offering a smaller version of the deed for $29.99, and to offer that version in museum gift shops for $19.99, he also said.
The focus of the 90-page paperback book is “the land itself,” Peterson said, but Lincoln’s buying it from Thomas helps to show that many historians have “overstated his disdain for his father.”
There were definitely “tensions” between the father and son, but those mostly arose from Lincoln having “a different design for his life” than did his father, who didn’t understand Lincoln’s “desire to do something with his life,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Peterson said the book does mention the legal battle the land’s former owner, Ray Phipps of Springfield, had with the land, mostly in a dispute with Mattoon attorney L. Stanton Dotson.
The first draft of the book included quite a bit of history of the court case, but when he and Arnold reviewed it they decided they wanted the book to “honor Abraham Lincoln’s memory” and not emphasize the dispute, he said.
“There will come a time when a more lengthy conversation of that will take place,” Peterson said. He added that he plans to research the dispute and might write about it but has no “particular plans” to do so.
Peterson said it took him about a year to do the research for the book, and he thought the story of the land had to include “Lincoln’s life up to the 1840s.” There are chapters on Lincoln’s time with his family when they lived in Kentucky and then Indiana before moving to Illinois.
The book also tells how the land “passed through the hands over time” and has a list of all who owned it, he said. That includes how John J. Hall, grandson of Lincoln’s stepmother Sarah Bush Lincoln, got title to the land in 1881 because Lincoln never sold it after his father died.
More information about the property and Arnold’s project can be found on his company’s Web site, www.lincolnfamilyfarm.com.
Contact Dave Fopay at dfopay@jg-tc.com or 238-6858.
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