Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Relations with women; Rutledge, Ann, -1835
The Bowling Green farm passed into the possession of strangers. Many
years ago the cabin of hewn logs was moved from under the brow of
the bluff down to the bank of the river and turned into a stable.
More than eighty years old now, this primitive structure that was
Lincoln’s home for three years, still stands. Every spring it is
threatened by freshets. You look across the flooded bottom land
to where it stands among cottonwoods and willows, and think--and
think--that this crumbling ruin, its squared logs worn and shrunken
and parted, its clapboard roof curled, its crazy door sagging from
the post, rang to that cry of desolation of our country’s hero-martyr.
He lies under a towering marble monument at Springfield, twenty miles
away. There is his crown of glory; here his Gethsemane.
Illustration: Photograph by C. U. Williams, Bloomington, Ill.
_The grave of Ann Rutledge, Oakland Cemetery, Petersburg,
Illinois._
Twenty years ago Ann Rutledge was brought in from the country
burying-ground and laid in Oakland Cemetery, in Petersburg. Only a
field boulder marks the mound to-day, but the young girls of the city
and county, who claim her as their own, are to celebrate Lincoln’s
centennial year by setting up a slender shaft of Carrara marble over
the grave of Lincoln’s lost love. Around her, on that forest-clad
bluff, lie Old Salem neighbours. It is a cheerful place, where
gardeners mow the grass and sweep the gravelled roadways, where
carriages drive in the park-like enclosure on Sunday afternoons and
flowers are laid lavishly on new-made graves. Bird-haunted, robins
chirp in the blue grass and woodpeckers drum on the tree-trunks;
bluebirds, tanagers and orioles, those jewels of the air with souls,
flash across the sunlit spaces, and the meadow-lark trills joyously
from a near-by field of clover.
No longer is she far away and alone, in cold and darkness and storm,
where he could not bear to think of her, but lying here among old
friends, in dear familiar scenes, under enchantment of immortal youth
and deathless love, on this sunny slope, asleep....
Flow gently, sweet Sangamon; disturb not her dream.
NOTE
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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