Today Concetta and I set out to accomplish not too much, and I think we succeeded admirably. Seriously, our goal was to visit the Abraham Lincoln Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. If you've been reading this blog since we first took our act on the road in the spring of 2014, you know that just about a year ago we came here and spent an entire day visiting the Lincoln home and the surrounding restored/recreated village that had been Lincoln's neighborhood while he was President. Back then the weather was a tad uncooperative, but we still managed to get some good photos and have a great time.
But Springfield is not a place that you can breeze into on a summer afternoon, spend a few hours, and be on your way again, especially not if you love history. Two years ago we managed the Lincoln Home as well as the Lincoln tomb just to the north of town, and came away feeling that we might never top that experience again. Even so, we knew we had missed almost as much as we had seen, including Lincoln's law office and the Lincoln library. Still, we realized that we couldn't spend a week in every town we loved, we had to move on.
Today we came back to Springfield for the Lincoln Library and Museum, and what an experience it was. Much of it left us choked up and humbled just as the tour of Lincoln's tomb had done. All of Lincoln's life was dealt with, from pioneer boyhood to assassination, as we might have expected. But we were entirely unprepared for the magnitude of artistry and historic completeness that we witnessed. Everything from holographic -- Disney-esque -- presentations, to full-room physical recreations of Lincoln's offices, residence rooms, and cabinet meetings were portrayed in stunning, lifelike realism. We were just plain blown away!
We started with the log cabin entrance, which concealed a number of rooms devoted to Lincoln's early childhood, his education (or lack thereof), and his home life. Lincoln was born in Kentucky, not too far from where my mother's father's people, the Jones family, were living at roughly the same time. From there they moved, as so many Kentuckians did, across the Ohio River into what had been Indian country as late as the end of the 18th century. They first went to Indiana, and then finished up near Springfield, Illinois, once again about 50 miles from where my Jones ancestors had also moved.
At that point it was time to see a couple of audio/visual presentations, according to a nice lady that had greeted us at the entrance. So we hurried off to the holographic room where, along with a couple of bus-loads of middle-school kids, we enjoyed just the most astounding presentation by a guy I could have sworn was there in front of us, but I suspect was never there at all. By the time he had finished his spiel on why those who study history are often accompanied by the ghosts of our ancestors, he had Concetta and I reaching for our handkerchiefs. Man it was marvelous, just marvelous.
The next presentation was also holographic in nature and dealt with Lincoln's Presidency and the trials he faced, both domestically and in the pubic eye, as our 16th President. By the time the holographic guy had finished with us there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
Once our theater time had finished, we continued our walk through the museum, which contained exhibits like anti-Lincoln cartoons that had attacked the six-foot, four-inch President, from his earliest days of running for the office, until his Union officers finally began to win a few battles late in the war. At that point the press began to give him a break. I especially liked the testimonies from Civil War soldiers that appeared along with accounts of what had ultimately happened to them. There was one room where you could watch a count of the casualties mount as each individual battle was "exploded" on a huge map of the U.S on the wall. There was one room with a myriad of personal possessions that belonged to the President and his wife, some of which had gone through many owners before coming to the museum.
All in all, we consider the Lincoln library and Museum every bit as awe-inspiring and humbling as had been the tomb that we visited two years ago. Taken as a whole, the Springfield Lincoln experience is just not to be equaled anywhere. If you come here, I would suggest planning on a stay of at least two full days. There are two nice RV camps just south of the city which are easy to find, and parking your RV near the Library/Museum is easy as they have a giant lot for buses and other large vehicles.
All too soon our museum time was up, though I managed to find a couple of irresistible items in the gift shop. You know I'm a sucker for books, but I needed to find just the "right" book. Since about 98% of the displayed copies were about every single aspect of Lincoln's life, I needed to find something totally out in left field, something that I didn't know anything about. I settled on Eric Foner's book "Gateway to Freedom," which is subtitled, "The hidden history of the underground railroad." Now that's a subject that ought to teach me a few things.
Once out of the museum, we headed back to the RV for a bit of lunch, then it was out on Route 55 South to exit what has become one of our favorite cities. Since we didn't do the fancy Union Pacific Railroad station for which we had tickets, nor did we get to the Lincoln law office, it's a foregone conclusion that we'll have to come back again. I suspect that we secretly planned it that way. And by the way, Lincoln's law office is just a couple of doors down from a really, really interesting antique book store that I saw last time.
My plan, if you can say that I ever really have a plan, was to drop south out of Springfield this afternoon on Route 55, pick up Route 67, and head south toward the town of Carrollton, Illinois. Were my dear mother still alive, she would probably be unable to contain her excitement. You see, her father's father was born in Carrollton, way back in the pre-Civil War year of 1849. John Heath Preston Jones, born to a father of exactly the same name, lived out here on the Illinois Prairie just north of St. Louis, on the east bank of the Illinois River. Just as his namesake did, John Heath Preston Jones died right here in Carrollton. Though my mother was never able to find out where either ancestor had been buried.
To that end, I planned a visit today to the Carrollton Genealogical Society, which was the reason for picking Route 67 out of Springfield. Unfortunately, we didn't arrive in Carrollton until 4:00 p.m. and the person who mans the office two days a week -- I had forgotten they were only open two days a week -- was not in the mood to extend her work hours to accommodate me. She did, however, offer to take my business card and be in contact with me at a later time. I'm not sure she quite grasped the fact that I had come all the way from Nevada to see her. Wanting to do more than just trust her to remember me, I dug into my wallet and fished out the necessary $15.00 to join the local Genealogical Society and maybe she'd be more apt to want to help me when I was a member.
But something incredibly positive came out of my visit to the Carrollton Genealogical Society. I met Neal. Neal was sitting chatting with the unhelpful lady when I walked in and put a wrinkle in her day. She wanted to go home since her shift evidently ended at 4:00 p.m. He, being quite the opposite type of personality, saw an immediate opportunity to make a new friend. Both listened patiently to my explanation as to why I had come, but only Neal perked up and really seemed to be interested. Of course, when I mentioned that I was looking for people who had been around in the 1840s, both Neal and the clerk shook their heads and professed to possess no knowledge of any Jones in the records that far back.
But here's where it got interesting. I was aware that Neal was talking to the clerk about a book he evidently had produced when I walked in. It was laying on the corner of the clerk's desk, and I could plainly see from the cover that Neal had been in the Navy. Since I wasn't getting anywhere with the clerk, I asked Neal about his time in the Navy. Since I was a Navy man, I knew we'd have a bond that might also help me establish a better bond with the clerk if she were a friend of his.
Well, Neal just exploded into conversation like he'd been looking for just such an opportunity all day. Before too many minutes had gone by I had learned that he was born in 1924, had joined the Navy in 1943, along with his brother, and had been designated a Navy corpsman, had stormed the beaches in places like Okinawa and lived to tell about it, had gotten out of the Navy unscathed, had joined the army during the Korean war, had survived that episode, and had come home to eventually become a banker. Now he was retired, looked like he was about seventy even though he was ninety-one, and was so full of vim and vigor I wondered if I'd be able to keep up with him if I asked him to show me cemeteries in the area.
All this time the clerk was looking at her watch by way of hinting that maybe we should take it outside. That's when I offered to join the society and become one of her supporters. That perked her up a bit and I think eventually I'll be able to count on her.
But Neal and I went on comparing war stories and life stories and favorite brands of cars and so forth. I learned he bought a 1946 Ford coupe when he got out of the Navy, paid $1,000 for it. His dad pulled some strings for him and got him on the automobile "waiting list" before the war even ended, Neal said, because his pop just knew there would be a huge number of people clamoring for cars.
About that time I told Neal that I was going to get a business card from the rig since I didn't have any left in my wallet. I asked him if he had one, but he told me no. He hadn't worked for decades he said. But by the time I got back from getting one of my cards, Neal had fished a card out from under the seat of his pickup, and he handed it to me. Then 91-year-old Neal said, "Do you know how to use the internet?"
I smiled. "Sure do," I said.
"Well," he said. "My email is on the back."
I turned the card over, and sure enough his address was written quite neatly in cursive. "Okay," I said. "I'll be emailing you."
By then we had almost parted a half dozen times, and each time we shook hands. Before either of us could turn and leave one of us would launch into some other topic. But finally we shook for the last time, I told him that one of these days I needed his secret for looking two decades younger than his age, which put a huge smile on his face. Then we turned and went our separate ways, both of us happier, healthier, and feeling more sure of the innate goodness of people in this world. I truly hope our paths cross again.
And that brings me to just what I got out of today's events. It's not the miles you drive, the places you see, the good deals you score, the impossible parking places you manage to snag, or the incredible lunches you got for a song, it's the people in this world and on this journey that make all the difference in your travels. The guard at the research library in Springfield that went out of his way to direct us to the proper building today when we took a wrong turn; the guide at the history museum who took the time to acquaint us with the daily schedule and make suggestions for seeing things in the proper order, then offering to take our picture together; the bus driver who sprinted over to help us when Concetta couldn't get the parking lot gate to rise; the parking booth person who sprinted over to rescue the bus driver AND Concetta when neither could get the gate to rise; to the many people to slow down when I try to make a difficult turn in the RV, knowing they have the right-of-way, but wanting to be patient; the RV park couple last night that let me buy a thirty-amp RV surge protector (photo left) at their cost since they had one another customer had failed to pick up; or just the legions of other RVers who always go out of their way to ask me how I'm doing, where I'm going, and where I've been. Those are just some of the many interpersonal connections you will encounter and enjoy as you travel this great land.
And that, dear readers, is what RVing is all about. We wish you Happy Travels!
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