Lincoln Trail Homestead State Memorial
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The Lincoln Trail Homestead State Memorial is a 162-acre (0.65 km²) state park located on the Sangamon River near Harristown, Illinois.
The state memorial contains the site of the 1830-1831 homestead of pioneer Thomas Lincoln and his family, including grown son Abraham Lincoln. It was here that Abraham split rails for his father's field, and also "hired out" to split rails for neighboring pioneer farmers, inspiring his later political nickname, the Rail Splitter. Rail fences were used by pioneer farmers to confine their stock, or to prevent free-range livestock from getting into and damaging a crop field.
The state memorial, created in 1938, now serves as a park and picnic area for the greater Decatur, Illinois metropolitan area. The park contains mature second-growth bottomland timber, including black walnut trees.
[edit] Lincoln's description
Abraham Lincoln himself described his life at the Lincoln Trail Homestead State Memorial in this 1860 account, which he ghost-wrote for his campaign manager:
"March 1, 1830, Abraham having just completed his twenty-first year, his father and family, with the families of the two daughters and sons-in-law of his stepmother, left the old homestead in Indiana and came to Illinois. Their mode of conveyance was wagons drawn by ox-teams, and Abraham drove one of the teams. They reached the county of Macon, and stopped there some time within the same month of March. His father and family settled a new place on the north side of the Sangamon River, at the junction of the timberland and prairie, about ten miles westerly from Decatur. Here they built a log cabin, into which they removed, and made sufficient of rails to fence ten acres of ground, fenced and broke the ground, and raised a crop of sown corn upon it the same year. These are, or are supposed to be, the rails about which so much is being said just now, though these are far from being the first or only rails ever made by Abraham."
