The Lincoln Country in Pictures

In the fall of 1828, James Rutledge and John Camron erected homes on this hill. The following year they built a grist and sawmill on the Sangamon River just below the hill, laid out the town of New Salem and began to sell lots. The mill became so popular that the town grew rapidly and flourished for several years although it never included more than one hundred inhabitants. With the founding and growth of Petersburg, two miles to the north and more accessibly located, its decline began. When the seat of the new County of Menard was located at Petersburg in 1839, New Salem quickly passed out of existence.

Abraham Lincoln resided at New Salem from the summer of 1831 until the spring of 1837, supporting himself successively as clerk and mill hand, soldier in the Black Hawk War, storekeeper, postmaster and deputy surveyor. In 1832 he entered politics. Although defeated in his first campaign for the Legislature, he was elected a member of the House of Representatives in 1834 and again in 1836. Throughout his residence at New Salem, Lincoln strove to perfect his education, studying grammar, mathematics, and finally law. Upon his admission to the bar in March 1837, he sought greater opportunities than New Salem offered, and so removed to Springfield.

This was Lincoln’s introduction to the people of New Salem. Denton Offut, a swaggering, boastful, hard-drinking frontiersman, was owner of the boat. He became so impressed with the thriving little village that he decided to return after the voyage to New Orleans, and open a store with Lincoln as his clerk. The new store was opened the following September.]

It was while working for Offut that Lincoln decided to improve his education. In fair weather, when there were no customers about, Lincoln could be seen lounging on the porch studying or talking with friends about slavery, crops, politics, cockfighting, horse racing or just telling stories to listening loafers.]

These tradesmen had come to New Salem to help fill the needs felt by everyone. At the height of its prosperity, New Salem had a population of a hundred citizens and some twenty-five or thirty buildings.]

The LINCOLN COUNTRY: IN PICTURES by Carl and Rosalie Frazier

Perhaps no man in American history has been viewed with such respect and reverence by the American people as has Abraham Lincoln. School children and scholars alike have been moved by the humanity of his deeply lined face, have marveled at his rise from poverty to the Presidency, have sorrowed anew at the tragedy of his death, have read his words and been unable to erase them from their memory. If there is one historic person most of us would like to know, it is Abraham Lincoln.

Here—in these pages which recreate the world Lincoln knew as a child and a young man—the reader can come close to Lincoln. In these fine photographs, which carefully depict the familiar, everyday scenes of young Abe’s manhood, he can see Lincoln’s world as Lincoln saw it. As the authors say: “It was from this frontier atmosphere and these frontier people that Lincoln acquired his uncanny understanding of how common folk think and the wisdom that enabled him to hold in his hands the ties that bound a people and made a nation.”

It is this atmosphere that the authors have captured in over 100 photographs, and it is the rhythm of frontier life that they have caught in the factual simplicity of the text. Here is the farm in Kentucky where Lincoln was born; here are reconstructed the smithy, the tavern, the houses of New Salem, Illinois where Lincoln was a clerk, where he studied law, where he was elected to the state legislature. Here is the Springfield that Lincoln knew when he was first elected to Congress, the town where his sons were born, where in 1860 he learned that he was a candidate for the Presidency. This is Lincoln’s country. As the reader follows Lincoln through the pages of this book, he will feel suddenly close to the man who left such an indelible imprint on the history of this nation—and upon its people.

CARL and ROSALIE FRAZIER live in Chicago, Illinois where they pursue their professions as artists and photographers. Their knowledge of Abraham Lincoln comes from their considerable and extensive research into Lincoln’s life and their many pilgrimages to those places where he lived in Kentucky, Indiana and Illinois.

The Fraziers became interested in trying to capture through the lenses of their cameras that certain something which attracts visitors by the thousands to the Lincoln shrines every year. They hope this picture book will preserve, or at least refresh the memories of these observant visitors, and bring to those who may never have this opportunity a better mental picture of this benevolent man’s environment.