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At Lincoln’s Illinois home, guides reveal the man behind the icon
Park Ranger Joseph Tonjes is standing on the steps of Abraham Lincoln’s home, giving instructions to a group of about 20 visitors: Don’t touch the furniture. Stay inside the stanchions and ropes.
“But as we head up, please use this handrail,” Mr. Tonjes says. “It is the only original artifact that we want you to touch. Think of it like giving Abraham a handshake as you walk up.”
He’s a relatively new ranger. He grew up on Long Island, New York, and graduated from Suffolk University in Boston a few years ago after majoring in history and philosophy. “So we drove pretty much everywhere,” Mr. Tonjes says, and those family road trips through national parks planted the idea that the National Park Service was a place a history degree could take you – in his case: Springfield, Illinois.
“You learn about Lincoln, but then you kind of learn about the man room by room,” Mr. Tonjes says. It takes him off his pedestal, he says, and makes him more relatable.
The house sits just blocks from the old path of Route 66, the American road now marking its 100th year. And as the nation approaches its 250th birthday, Springfield offers a particular kind of encounter with Lincoln: not just the president who preserved the United States, but the self-taught lawyer whose political imagination, as he later said himself, could be traced back to the Declaration of Independence. Here, the founding ideals are not encountered first in marble or oratory, but in the rooms where Lincoln became the man who would carry them into the country’s most significant crisis.
Inside the home, Mr. Tonjes guides visitors through a version of Lincoln that can feel unexpectedly ordinary. There are stories about sons wrestling in the sitting room rough enough to tear their clothes. Lincoln arriving home late and bringing stray cats inside. A family mourning the death of a child in the front parlor. With its original doors and furniture, the rooms feel less like the birthplace of a national icon than the remnants of a life interrupted.