Lincoln's New Salem
New Salem is the historically recreated townsite of Abraham Lincoln's, 19th century, frontier village in Menard County (previously part of Sangamon County), Illinois, United States. During his 20s, in the 1830s, this was the homestead of the future U.S. President. Here, Lincoln earned a living as a boatman, shopkeeper, soldier in the Black Hawk War, general store owner, postmaster, land surveyor, rail splitter, and was first elected to the Illinois General Assembly. Lincoln moved away to the nearby capitol of Springfield around 1836.
New Salem was recreated as a historic village in the 1930s, based on the original foundations. The first village was generally abandoned about 1840, as other towns developed. The village is located 15 mi (24 km) northwest of Springfield, and approximately 3 mi (4.8 km) south of Petersburg. (The present village of New Salem in Pike County, Illinois is a different and separate community.)
Read more about Lincoln's New Salem: Original New Salem, Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site
Famous quotes containing the words lincoln and/or salem:
“Down the road, on the right hand, on Brister’s Hill, lived Brister Freeman, “a handy Negro,” slave of Squire Cummings once.... Not long since I read his epitaph in the old Lincoln burying-ground, a little on one side, near the unmarked graves of some British grenadiers who fell in the retreat from Concord,—where he is styled “Sippio Brister,”MScipio Africanus he had some title to be called,—”a man of color,” as if he were discolored.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger
puts the inked-in X’s”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)