Modernity and history comingle uneasily in downtown Springfield. State workers, lobbyists, and tourists pass along a patchwork quilt of ordinary paved roads and old-timey cobbled boulevards dotted with Subways, Starbucks, Abe Lincoln statues, and souvenir shops. The servants of the state go about the government’s business in mundane-looking office towers or under the silver dome of the capitol building, while visitors shuffle in and out of structures crafted to resemble the city from our favorite son’s pre-Great Emancipator days—including the Old State Capitol that’s now a museum of bygone legislation. Illinois’s capital city is a place that increasingly resembles a northern version of Colonial Williamsburg.
Umbrella in hand, I left Boone’s for Young Mr. Lincoln’s old hood, now the 12-acre Lincoln Home National Historic Site. All the houses and yards in this four-block area are meticulously preserved and restored to look as they might have when Abe and family resided there in the mid-1850s. Part of what’s impressive about Lincoln’s crib is its modesty. It’s no log-cabin hovel, but compared to the splendor of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello or George Washington’s Mount Vernon, Lincoln’s two-story Greek Revival and white picket fence feels extraordinarily ordinary—which perfectly fits Honest Abe’s humble reputation. What’s striking, however, is the emptiness: At one of Springfield’s main tourist attractions, just a handful of curious tourists milled about. The only sound was the crunch of the gravel road beneath my feet.
Also inaccessible was the home of early-20th-century traveling troubadour Vachel Lindsay—a School of the Art Institute of Chicago grad who pioneered a kind of theatrical, repetitive spoken-word form that was arguably a precursor to slam poetry and hip-hop. Springfield historians have since sanded the edges off Lindsay. He’s now almost exclusively known for his laudatory poems about Lincoln (“the quaint great figure that men love / The prairie-lawyer, master of us all,” he wrote in “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight”), yet he was something of a bohemian radical in his time who advocated for racial equality and labor rights. But fame was fleeting for Lindsay. Shortly after returning to Springfield in 1931 from performing during a grueling six-month road trip, exhausted and penniless, he committed suicide in the house by drinking a bottle of drain cleaner.
Finally, it was time to boldly go into the heart of darkness: the Illinois Executive Mansion. I envisioned bumping into the governor traipsing through in his house slippers while chewing on a golden pipe. I’d ask him why he’s using his personal fortune to renovate the crumbling 160-year-old building while neglecting the rest of downtown—and the whole state, for that matter. But alas, the black gate of Rauner’s crypt was locked. A sign stated the mansion was open on Saturdays, from 9:30-11 AM.
