Which U.S. presidents have been the most environmentally important? Opinions vary, but generally included in the top 5 is a name you might not expect—Abraham Lincoln. And the place where Abraham Lincoln learned to love the land was established as the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial on February 19, when President John Kennedy signed it into law.
Abraham Lincoln is often associated with Illinois—the Land of Lincoln—because that was where he lived as an adult. But it was in southern Indiana that he grew up. In 1816, when Lincoln was seven, his family moved from Kentucy to a homestead along Little Pigeon Creek, near the town now known as Lincoln City, Indiana. He lived there for 14 years, leaving for Illinois at the age of 21. Lincoln remembered his time there: “We reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up.”
Indeed, this is where he learned to carve a homestead from the wilderness and to farm. He became skilled with an ax, so much so that he became known as “the rail-splitter.” He learned to read and devoured every book he could find. His two favorite tools, he said, were a book and an ax. He spent time working on a flatboat on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, learning the ways of nature and the ways of people.
After the Lincoln’s moved on to Illinois, the legacy of his time in Indiana gradually began to disappear. But in the 1930s, the state of Indiana created the Lincoln State park, designed partly by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., to preserve the original homestead. In 1962, one-hundred acres of that park were deeded to the U.S. government for the creation of the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial. The park opened in 1964.
The Memorial contains the site of the Lincoln’s original cabin, plus a living history reconstruction of an 1820s-era farm. A 1940s-era limestone building serves as a tableau of his early life and legacy. Visitation is not high, hovering around 125,000 annually since it opened.
Read MoreApril is Keep America Beautiful Month
Back in 1971, The Keep America Beautiful organization teamed up with the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to create Keep American Beautiful Day. It was expanded in 1982 to a week, and then to the entire month of April in 1984. As spring takes hold of the weather and the landscape awaken with the greening of trees and grasses, the blooming of wildflowers and the melodies of nesting songbirds, we, too, ought to take special notice of our beautiful environment—and do something to, as they say, keep it beautiful.
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