The Lincoln-Tallman House: Where Lincoln Slept

The Tallman House in Janesville is an Italianate mansion built in eighteen fifty-seven for William Tallman, an abolitionist lawyer and businessman whose house is said to have served as a station on the Underground Railroad, though historians disagree. In October of eighteen fifty-nine, Abraham Lincoln visited Janesville on a speaking tour and stayed the night with the Tallman family. It is the only recorded time Lincoln stayed in a Wisconsin home.

The house is now a museum operated by the Rock County Historical Society and retains much of its original furnishings. Lincoln would be elected president the following year, and the Tallmans' antislavery convictions, typical of many prosperous Wisconsin families of the era, would soon shape the political character of a nation at war.