Current efforts to restore the ruined site where Abraham Lincoln began his political ascent – San Diego Union -Tribune

In 1831 Abraham Lincoln arrived at the New Salem Grist Mill along the Sangamon river aboard a flowing boat.

Lincoln had been hired by a man by the name of Denton Offutt to deliver the cargo of the boat to New Orleans. As the story says, Offutt was so impressed by Lincoln’s rapid reflection to save the boat and save the cargo that he gave him a job in a store he planned to open in New Salem. Lincoln came back from the trip to Cargaison and decided to stay in New Salem, about 20 miles northwest of Springfield, Illinois.

As Lincoln left the city in 1837, he was a state legislator and his political career was taken off. While New Salem was mainly abandoned in the years that followed Lincoln’s departure for Springfield, then Washington, DC, it was rebuilt in the 1930s as a historic site which attracted nearly 400,000 visitors last year.

But time has wreaked havoc on the efforts of the state to commemorate Lincoln in the city where he developed his political chops.

The new historic site of Lincoln’s Salem State fell in ruins because the tab for the maintenance delayed on the properties managed by the Illinois Ministry of Natural Resources has increased to around 1 billion dollars throughout the state, according to IDNR spokesperson Jayette Bolinski.

In recent years, the roofs of two structures have sold. The grain mill, where the city dwellers crushed the wheat in flour, is closed, with boards through the entrance. There are holes in the wooden entrance ramp, and the mill training tree, which has propelled the structure, has been inoperable from a 2016 flood.

Gina Gillmore-Wolter, president of New Salem Lincoln League, said that he was not sure that schoolchildren walk along the road, or on the closed pedestrian bridge, to reach the mill.

When the site responsibility, with all the other historic state sites, was transferred to the IDNR of Illinois Historic Preservation Agency in 2017, New Salem ceased to obtain $ 200,000 per year from the State Capital Fund. At the same time, IDNR suffered from almost two decades of disinvestment, said Bolinski.

However, efforts are underway to restore the new Salem. IDNR announced this week that the site would receive around $ 8 million in funding for improvements in the capital improvement plan of Rebuild Illinois. The site received a total of around $ 3 million in capital funding since Governor JB Pritzker took office in 2019.

In addition, the senator of the republican state Steve McClure, who represents the region, directs a bipartite legislative effort to rehabilitate the site in coordination with the new Salem Lincoln league. The legislation made up of three separate bills would create a new SALEM preservation commission under the IDNR to assess the site and provide a budget to repair the structures. The measure would also create an exception of supply due to the difficulty of finding business people with skills in construction similar to those used in the 1830s which are necessary to correctly rebuild the structures, according to the Republican representative Wayne Rosenthal, the sponsor of the legislation.

IDNR estimates that it will cost $ 19 million to rehabilitate the site, much higher than the $ 5 million specified in the legislation. An amendment will be added to update this cost, according to McClure, as well as other amendments to demand that the IDNR carry out an immediate assessment of the site and fall under the general meeting within 30 days.

The ministry does not support the creation of a preservation committee as indicated in the legislation, affirming in a press release that this would create an unnecessary layer of “bureaucracy and paperwork”. However, he “proposed to conclude a” friends “arrangement with the Lincoln League, which would help achieve our common goals without creating an excessive additional bureaucracy,” the statement said.

McClure said he thought that IDNR was concerned that the new Salem site was fully funded, the IDNR should provide similar help to all the other sites it supervises.

“Well, in my opinion, the new Salem is the most important historical site of the state,” said McClure. “This site, where the whole political career (of Lincoln) began, has somehow fell into the abyss, and we have to protect it.”

McClure said that the Grist mill where Lincoln has arrived for the first time is the absolute priority of the project.

“The shape in which it is found is quite urgent,” said McClure during a recent site tour, pointing a piece of loose wood. “I mean, look at this. It is a security risk. “

“If this is what we may do with one of the most important structures in the village, why even the open site?” He asked.

The mill is largely inaccessible. The pedestrian bridge which connects the structure, located at the bottom of the city hill and on a highway, is closed. New staircases were added about a year ago, but they stop halfway through the hill. Gillmore-Wolter said the region was not safe for school outings.

“You are going to have to do a kind of parking that has a railing that is sure for children during school trips to access it because they have torn off the stairs that came there and you can see the new stairs, but they blocked them,” said Gillmore-Wolter. “They are like the stairs that do not go anywhere.”

The roofs on two structures, the Grange Trent which belonged to the operator of Ferry Alexander Trent, and the Moulin in Carton, where the city dwellers “crowd” or paint, the wool of their sheep, were also collapsed.

The cardboard mill is the only cardboard mill powered by animal in the United States, according to Gillmore-Wolter. When she visited the site when she was a child in the 1970s and 1980s, there were oxen fueling the mill.

At the time of Lincoln, the people of the city cistrate their sheep, washed the fleece and made the wool map using the mill. Then he would be straightened and turned into the thread and the thread.

“It is the start of the industrial revolution when we started to remove this process from the house where people sit for a week to make boxes the same amount of wool you could make and do it in a few hours,” said Gillmore-Wolter.

The roofs were damaged by exposure to humidity, which led to deterioration and rot. Now that the roofs have disappeared, this will accelerate the same process for the rest of the structure, said Rosenthal.

“When you lose the roof and the other logs remain wet all the time, they will deteriorate,” said Rosenthal. “This will continue on this building and you will see this continue all the structures here, unless they are properly repaired and supported. At the moment, this is not the case.”

The site has seven employees and Rosenthal said that a larger staff were necessary to help manage and maintain the park, which also includes a campsite and trails.

Gillmore-Wolter said she remembers when the site was moving with period reconstructions.

“You came here and there would be people who were soaking candles. There would be people who would do soap. There would be people who cooked on open fires. The blacksmith would hammer in the blacksmith’s store,” said Gillmore-Wolter.

McClure said that the site introduction video has not been working for a few months, despite investments in new equipment by the new Lincoln Salem Lincoln.

“It’s pathetic,” said McClure about the video that doesn’t work. “This is where President Abraham Lincoln, one of the most famous people to live, started his career in politics, and you can’t even watch the introductory video.”

The Lincoln League and the Abraham Lincoln association led an effort in 2019 to request funding from the state for repairs, but they did not file any legislation, and the Pandemic Covid-19 ended the effort, according to Gillmore-Wolter.

McClure provides for continuous bipartite support for its legislation, which has the support of at least two Democrats in Chicago, Senator Bill Cunningham and Senator Robert Peters.

In addition to its historical importance, the site gives a boost to the small town of Petersburg just to the north, said David Blanchette, a local journalist who was involved in museums in the region, such as the presidential library and the Abraham Lincoln museum in Springfield. Blanchette said the site was “very peaceful”.

“There are trails lined with trees you can walk,” said Blanchette. “There is also a lot of economic impact when tourists come to the community and spend money in restaurants and service stations and night owners and accommodation and this results in jobs and income for the community.”

New Salem attracted 359,950 community visitors to 2024 and 374,418 visitors in 2023 according to Bolinski.

For others who have grown up in the region, it provides a direct link with the past. Gillmore-Wolter learned that his great-great-arre-arrival-Grand-Ucle, Alexander Ferguson, was Lincoln’s shoe shoemaker in the city.

“These are only names on a page, they become real people with a story, so it’s the motivation factor for me,” she said.

Originally published: March 28, 2025 at 10:46 PDT