When you grow up in Illinois, you grow up with a great awareness and appreciation for Abraham Lincoln. The license plates proclaim your state as the “Land of Lincoln” and the penny just feels like it came right out of the Illinois soil.
Even so, growing up in a suburb of Chicago, Lincoln always seemed remote. He belonged more to Springfield, the state capital, than to us. In Minnesota, it is easy to imagine people living in sod houses built into hills or in log cabins in the woods, but Illinois is all farms and cities.
Well, almost all. There are also quite a few quaint, historic small towns. In 1993, my parents moved to such a town, Frankfort, Illinois, 20 miles west of where I grew up, that had quite a bit of “1890s charm.” It has been all but completely swallowed up by sprawl, but their neighborhood retains a bit of the historic character, as does the town square.
Starved Rock with muddy handprints
Every Thanksgiving, our family goes further west on I-80 (Go West!) to another area of quaint little towns near Starved Rock State Park. We’ve been going there for years, but only in recent years have we made a regular habit of staying at the WPA lodge at the park. Each year Steve points out the engineering achievement of the giant beams that hold up the roof. We hike in the canyons and then play games in the lodge.
This year, before arriving at the Lodge on the day after Thanksgiving, we stopped in the town of Ottawa for brunch at the Bee Hive Restaurant, quite a nice diner. Driving through the downtown we passed a town square with a large statue of two figures. It could only be Lincoln and Douglas, I thought, though I thought the debates happened, like all things Lincoln, in Springfield. In fact, none of the seven debates took place in Springfield or Chicago, where both candidates were known, but in the other seven districts in the state.
After breakfast we went to the square which was, indeed, the site of the first Lincoln-Douglas debate. In this, a senatorial debate in 1858, Douglas tried to describe Lincoln as an abolitionist, and Lincoln put forward his passionate arguments against the spread of slavery in the territories (while denying he wanted to abolish slavery altogether). He made many remarks that expressed his “hatred” of the institution of slavery, and he also made remarks that show equality for African-Americans was not his goal. After losing the election, Lincoln collected the debates into a book that raised his profile and went a long way to getting him elected to the presidency in 1860.
A rock tunnel
Swelling with our native Lincoln pride and love of this little town decked out for the Christmas parade that would happen that evening (in 20-degree weather!), we proceeded to the WPA lodge. From there it was down into the canyons of Starved Rock, which was as beautiful dry as it is when there are waterfalls. We were also out of the wind, and able to walk freely through the caverns, rock tunnels, and store up images. I’d hoped later to use the new pastels I bought for my niece to make some pictures of the canyons with her, but in the end a game of Uno Spin won out.
And the next day we headed north on I-39 and home to Minnesota, bypassing the city entirely.
Dry tree roots in a Starved Rock canyon