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| West side of the Square in Springfield, IL 1858 (Lincoln & Herndon's law office is on the second floor in the rear of the building marked w/ a glowing circle and X.) |
In 1846, Springfield was a bustling prairie capital of roughly four thousand people — still small enough that everyone knew everyone else’s business, yet large enough to feel like a city on the rise. Set amid the flat, open Illinois prairie, where the horizon stretches unbroken in every direction, the growing cluster of homes, shops, and public buildings stood as a kind of declaration in wood and brick: civilization has arrived.
Yet “civilization” in Springfield only went so far. Raised wooden sidewalks offered a hint of refinement, but the streets between them were nothing more than packed earth. After a rain or a thaw, they dissolved into a thick, sucking mud locals derisively called Springfield Soup, a substance that could swallow a boot or stall a wagon without much effort. In summer, the same streets dried into a fine, drifting dust that coated clothing, storefronts, and the inside of one’s mouth with equal indifference.
Wagon wheels carved deep ruts through the soft ground, their iron rims grinding and groaning as oxen, horses, and mule‑drawn carts strained forward. Each passing load rattled past the public square, shaking the windows of nearby shops. Horses tied outside storefronts flicked their tails at persistent flies, stamping and snorting and releasing piles of manure as the day’s traffic churned the street into clouds that hung in the air long after the wagons had moved on.
Closer to the center of town, the streets gathered more life — and more noise. The smell of manure mingled with the sharper tang of hot iron from the blacksmith shops, where hammers rang steadily against anvils. Woodsmoke drifted from chimneys in every direction — winter and summer — settling into the low places between buildings and giving the air a faint, constant haze.
Livestock wandered freely, as much a part of Springfield’s daily rhythm as its people. Hogs rooted through refuse behind shops, snuffling at kitchen scraps tossed from back doors. Their squeals rose above the clatter of wheels, a living reminder of the town’s long‑running “Swine Wars,” the civic quarrel that had yet to banish them from the streets. Chickens scattered ahead of passing wagons, and a lone cow might be found grazing beside a rail fence, unbothered by the bustle around her.
This was the Springfield, Illinois of the 1840s — a place proud of its growing institutions and rising ambitions, yet still rough‑edged, muddy, and unmistakably frontier in its sights, sounds, and smells.
At the center of town rose the new Statehouse — square, solid, and unmistakably the heart of the capital. Its limestone columns caught the prairie light, their Greek Revival lines giving the building a gravity the young city eagerly claimed as its own. Inside, the halls echoed with the shuffle of lawyers’ boots and the murmur of clerks carrying papers across the yard. Politicians lingered on the steps, arguing tariffs, railroads, and the distant war with Mexico. Abraham Lincoln moved among them, his long coat swinging behind him as he crossed the yard, nodding to familiar faces on his way to the law office he shared with William Herndon on the west side of the square.
Around the Statehouse, two‑story brick buildings formed a loose, uneven ring — law offices, dry‑goods stores, taverns, boarding houses. Many borrowed from the same Greek Revival vocabulary as the capitol: simple cornices, symmetrical façades, columned porches. But refinement sat cheek‑by‑jowl with roughness. A traveler in 1845 observed that Springfield had “a good many good buildings and a great many bad ones,” and the truth of it was plain. Fresh brick storefronts stood beside weathered log cabins; ambitious new blocks rose next to frame structures patched with mismatched boards. The town was growing faster than it could smooth its edges.
The business district hummed with frontier energy. Nearly twenty dry‑goods stores lined the streets, joined by hardware shops, an iron foundry, groceries, and the full range of workshops needed to serve a growing region. Three steam‑powered flouring mills and a sawmill added their steady hum to the town’s soundscape, their engines marking Springfield as a place where industry was beginning to take root. The air was thick, hazy, and alive with motion — woodsmoke mingling with the smell manure, leather from saddleries and the metallic tang of blacksmith forges.
Hotels and taverns added their own rhythms to the square. The American House — a three‑story brick hotel at Sixth and Adams — stood as the grandest establishment west of the Alleghenies, its carpets, wallpaper, and polished furnishings astonishing travelers unaccustomed to such refinement on the prairie. Legislators gathered in its parlors, where politics softened into conversation over coffee and cigars. A few blocks away, the Globe Tavern — where the Lincolns lived during their first year of marriage and where their son Robert Todd Lincoln was born on August 1, 1843 — offered a rougher charm: teamsters crowded its tables, the smell of ale and frying pork hung heavy in the air, though its noisy, crowded conditions soon drove the Lincolns to seek quieter quarters. The St. Charles Hotel and the Chenery House added their own layers to the city’s social map, each drawing a distinct mix of travelers, businessmen, and locals.
Beyond the bustle of commerce, Springfield opened into quieter streets. Houses sat on generous lots, flanked by privies, woodsheds, small stables and outbuildings. Even modest homes often carried a touch of Greek Revival styling — a front‑facing gable, a simple classical cornice, a doorway framed with pilasters. Laundry flapped on backyard lines. Children chased each other through the dust. Families kept cows and chickens in their yards, giving the capital the feel of a farm town wrapped around a political center.
Among these homes, at the corner of Eighth and Jackson, stood the Lincoln cottage — a modest one‑and‑a‑half‑story house in 1846, still growing into the family that occupied it. Laundry stirred on the line. Neighbors called greetings across fences or paused at the town pump. From somewhere down the street, a church bell rang the hour, marking time in a town that was part frontier, part capital, and wholly in transition.
Springfield’s civic life was as varied as its architecture. For a town of its size, the number of churches was striking: two Presbyterian congregations, along with Methodist Episcopal, Baptist, Episcopalian, Catholic, and Campbellite churches, each drawing its own circle of worshippers. On any given Sunday, hymns drifted from multiple directions, and visiting ministers of every stripe occasionally added their voices to the mix. The religious landscape mirrored the town itself — diverse, energetic, and still sorting out its identity.
As daylight faded, Springfield’s social life gathered in familiar places. The town’s taverns and hotels served as its true drawing rooms for the men, where news traveled faster than the mail and politics mixed freely with everyday gossip. The American House offered polished conversation and political debate softened by carpets and cigars. The Globe Tavern offered noise, ale, and the rough democracy of teamsters and farmers. Between them lay the full spectrum of frontier society.
Springfield’s cultural life was modernizing, too. In 1845, the frontier town welcomed its first photographers. Frederick Coombs arrived that September, advertising “Daguerreotype Miniatures — For a short time only, at the American House,” along with phrenological examinations for fifty cents. A month later, Nicholas H. Shepherd — “late of New York City” — set up his camera above Delany’s Grocery on Adams Street, promising likenesses “from the smallest to the largest ever taken in this country.” The following year, Shepherd produced the earliest known photograph of Abraham Lincoln, capturing the 37‑year‑old congressman‑elect at the threshold of national life.
Politics remained Springfield’s constant heartbeat. With the legislature in session, the streets filled with lawmakers, clerks, and citizens seeking influence or simply hoping to witness the spectacle of government. Debates spilled from the Statehouse steps into the taverns, where arguments over tariffs, banks, internal improvements, and the Mexican‑American War mingled with stories, jokes, and the clatter of glasses. Newspapers fanned the flames, their editorials read aloud in barbershops, boarding houses, and smoky corners of taverns.
Amid this swirl of activity moved Abraham Lincoln. He was a familiar figure — tall, slightly stooped, his long stride carrying him from the Statehouse to his law office, from his office to the courthouse, and from there to the American House or a client’s shop. He paused often to exchange greetings, to listen, to laugh, to tell a story that drew a small crowd. In taverns - although he was a teetotaler - Lincoln was as comfortable discussing national policy as he was spinning a frontier anecdote; in court he was deliberate and sharp; in private conversation, warm and unpretentious. Springfield knew him not as a monument but as a neighbor, a colleague, a man whose presence threaded through the daily life of the town.
🌾 Closing Note
By the mid‑1840s, Springfield was a study in contradictions—a frontier outpost struggling to become a sophisticated state capital. If the streets were muddy and the buildings uneven, the energy was unmistakable. It was a town striving for refinement while still rooted in the raw prairie, a place where soaring ambition and rough edges coexisted on every block.
In this, the town mirrored the man. Lincoln, too, was a work in progress: a mix of high-minded law and folk-spun stories, of rising stature and lingering shadows. He was a man finding his voice in a town finding its feet, within a country finding its soul.
A nation, a town, a man — all standing at the edge of a transformation that would reshape the world.
A glimpse from the archives of Abraham Lincoln, Storyteller.
Mac
Works Cited
[1] National Park Service. "The Lincolns in Springfield 1837-1847". Retrieved January 29, 2026.
[2] Hart, Dick. Lincoln's Springfield Blog. Retrieved January 29, 2026 from https://lincolnsspringfield.blogspot.com/search/label/Springfield
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