The Only Home He Ever Owned

At the corner of Eighth and Jackson, a modest two-story frame house sits behind a white picket fence on a brick-paved street. This is the only home Abraham Lincoln ever owned. He and Mary bought it in eighteen forty-four for fifteen hundred dollars from the Reverend Charles Dresser, the same minister who had married them two years earlier.

When they moved in it was a simple one-and-a-half-story cottage. By eighteen fifty they had expanded it to two full stories, adding rooms as their family and Lincoln's ambitions grew. Three of their four sons were born inside these walls.

Their second son Eddie died here in eighteen fifty, just short of his fourth birthday. Lincoln lived at Four Thirteen South Eighth Street for seventeen years, longer than he lived anywhere else in his life. Neighbors knew him as a man who walked to the market in the mornings, who let his boys run loose and wild, who could be spotted sitting on the back stoop reading law books while the children tumbled around the yard.

Mary complained about the disorder. Lincoln seemed not to mind. From this house he rode the Eighth Judicial Circuit, sometimes gone for weeks across the muddy central Illinois courthouses.

From this parlor he was asked to run for president in eighteen sixty. Delegations of Republicans climbed these porch steps to pay their respects after the nomination. In February of eighteen sixty-one he said goodbye to his neighbors and walked away down Eighth Street for the last time.

The house was rented out. He never came back. Today the National Park Service maintains the house and the surrounding four-block neighborhood as Lincoln Home National Historic Site, restored to its eighteen-sixty appearance.

The floors creak in exactly the places they would have creaked then.