Monday, March 2, 2009 11:00 PM CST
COLUMN: Lincoln-Sargent Dinner was fun but historic site needs to be open
By BILL LAIR, Managing Editor
blair@jg-tc.com
Gov. Pat Quinn, who has plenty on his mind these days, is asking Illinois residents to do one more thing in 2009.
In this, the 200th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, the state’s newest governor is asking each of us to learn something new about Lincoln.
“That’s a challenge from the governor,” Carolyn Brown Hodge told those attending the Lincoln-Sargent Farm Foundation’s Lincoln Bicentennial Celebration Saturday.
“Anytime you see him, and he does get around the entire state of Illinois, tell him what you have learned. He would like that,” said Hodge, a Paris resident who is deputy chief of staff for Quinn.
Now that’s an interesting challenge: Learn something new about Lincoln. It might be difficult to learn a whole lot new about the 16th president who has been the subject of hundreds of books.
The Lincoln-Sargent Farm Foundation helps promote Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site, the home of Lincoln’s father and stepmother, Thomas and Sarah Bush Lincoln.
I don’t claim to be an expert on Lincoln so there is still a lot for me to learn about him.
But I picked up a couple new nuggets of information Saturday at the Lincoln-Sargent Dinner that I could share with the governor next time I bump into him.
I learned that Lincoln had a boyhood chum in Indiana, Austin Gullaher, who saved Lincoln from drowning.
Brian “Fox” Ellis, a storyteller from the Peoria area, portrayed Gullaher while telling some “Lincoln Tales Tall and True” at the Lincoln-Sargent gathering at the EIU Union University Ballroom.
Ellis’s Gullaher said that after some heavy spring rains he and Lincoln were playing along a swollen stream and neither boy could swim.
A log had fallen across the stream and Lincoln decided to race across it. But Lincoln slipped and fell in. The current started to sweep him away.
Gullaher tore a branch off a nearby tree and held it out to Lincoln, who grabbed it and was pulled to safety.
That was a new story for me.
Ellis also mentioned the time that Lincoln was kicked in the head by a horse at a grist mill as a second time Lincoln escaped death in his early days.
If either instance had proved fatal, think how history would have been different.
I recall having heard the kick-in-the-head tale but never the Austin Gullaher story.
Another thing I learned that night wasn’t so much about Lincoln as about the time of Illinois’ early settlement.
One reason, perhaps, that Thomas Lincoln moved his family from Indiana to Illinois is that he heard about the fertile land in the new state through music.
Ellis explained that veterans of the War of 1812 had received land in Illinois as compensation but many sold that land to speculators rather than move to the “wild west.”
Speculators hired a songwriter to travel up and down the Eastern seaboard to detail the virtues of the new territory in song.
Here are a few lines from the song, “El-a-noy”:
Way down upon the Wabash
Such land was never known
If Adam had passed over it
the soil he’d surely own
He’d think it was the garden
he played in as a boy
and straight pronounce it Eden
in the state of El-a-noy
So move your family westward good health you will enjoy
and rise to wealth and honor in the state of Illinois.
It was an entertaining evening, although bittersweet because Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic site remains closed after former Gov. Rod Blagojevich closed historic sites and state parks in the fall.
But last week, Quinn announced that state parks, including Hidden Springs State Forest and Wolf Creek State Park, both in Shelby County, will re-open soon.
And Hodge said Quinn’s “next mission” is to get historic sites funded so they can re-open.
“Especially during the bicentennial, all Lincoln sites should have what they need,” Hodge said. “He will get them open as soon as he can.”
That, of course, was welcome news to Lincoln buffs at Saturday’s event.
John Woodruff, immediate past president of the Lincoln-Sargent Farm Foundation, said the site has been working with historical administration students at Eastern Illinois University to create a new exhibit on looms.
The site had been planning to add a loom house at the farm until the state budget crisis put the project on hold.
But a new exhibit on looms for making fabric in the 1840s will be in place this year.
“We are optimistic about the future with a new exhibit and the loom house,” Woodruff said.
He also mentioned that the annual program for fifth-grade students remains a priority at Lincoln Log Cabin.
He said about 750 fifth-graders attended the program in the fall and that another 750 are expected to take part in the daylong program this spring.
Other Lincoln Birthday Bicentennial events are planned throughout the area this year, including some special programs at Lincoln Log Cabin.
But the best news for those people from the Charleston-Mattoon area who support the programs and exhibits at the Lincoln and Sargent farms will be when Gov. Quinn re-opens Lincoln Log Cabin State Historic Site seven days a week.
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