History
Fifty years after Lincoln's death (1915), the Illinois General Assembly authorized the Illinois State Historical Library to mark the exact route traveled by Lincoln from Kentucky through Indiana to Illinois. Almost another 50 years passed before the 1,000-mile (1,600 km) trail was opened in 1963. Author Andrew Ferguson cites Robert Newman, Illinois' director of tourism in the 1960s, as saying "the whole thing was cooked up by the marketing guys at the American Petroleum Institute. ... They wanted to get people traveling. Get 'em into their cars, get 'em buying gasoline." The Trail originally had 3,000 markers showing Lincoln's route to Illinois.
Read more about this topic: Lincoln Heritage Trail
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Considered in its entirety, psychoanalysis won’t do. It’s an end product, moreover, like a dinosaur or a zeppelin; no better theory can ever be erected on its ruins, which will remain for ever one of the saddest and strangest of all landmarks in the history of twentieth-century thought.”
—Peter B. Medawar (1915–1987)
“These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)