The Wall Street Journal-20080212-Lincoln- Logs and Opportunity
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Lincoln, Logs and Opportunity
Full Text (976 words)If it weren't for John Wilkes Booth, along with a few other considerations, Abraham Lincoln would be celebrating his 199th birthday today. To mark the occasion, First Lady Laura Bush will travel to the tiny town of Hodgenville, Ky., and deliver a speech at the site of Lincoln's birth, officially kicking off the two-year celebration of the Lincoln Bicentennial. If you haven't made a visit to Hodgenville -- well, you should. The Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site offers one of the oddest experiences in historical tourism. It's stirring and amusing all at once, if you're in the mood and know the story.
Lincoln was born in a log cabin. You may have heard about this. The cabin rested on a rise above a watering hole called "Sinking Spring." Lincoln's father, Thomas, moved his family a few years later to another farm, and then another. The birth cabin was abandoned to its little bluff, prey to wind and weather.
But then came Booth and martyrdom. More important, then came the Gilded Age. Entrepreneurs scoured the commercial republic for new ways to make and spend money. By then Lincoln's life story had congealed into myth, a proof of the country's belief in itself as a place where any low-born boy could rise to any height of fame and accomplishment. No firmer expression of this truth could be found than the humble site of Lincoln's birth -- and no place, thought a New York entrepreneur named Alfred Dennett, would make a better site for a lavish spa and resort.
Dennett bought the farm in 1894 through a local agent, who soon learned from old-timers that sometime in the 1850s the original cabin had been moved to another farm a mile away. So Dennett bought the cabin, too, and promptly had it dismantled and reconstructed on the bluff above the spring.
Then he took out ads in the national prints and waited for the tourists, and the money, to roll in.
And he waited. Little more than a trickle materialized. Desperate to make good on his investment, Dennett hit on a new angle. Fewer than a hundred miles from Sinking Spring was a cabin said to be the birthplace of Jefferson Davis. For a country still trying to bind up the wounds of the Civil War, the two humble cabins side by side would make a powerful symbol -- powerful enough, indeed, to yield a profit.
So again Dennett had both cabins dismantled and moved, this time to Nashville, where they were reassembled on the midway of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition of 1897. Again box office was disastrous. Dennett gave up. The cabins were dismantled once more and brought to Manhattan, where the logs were stored in a rented warehouse on the Lower East Side. From time to time they were brought out and reassembled for paying customers, appearing at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1901, and later at Coney Island.
By then Dennett had unloaded the logs onto a pair of promoters who soon realized that they, too, had no clue what to do with them. When word of the cabin's rough treatment hit the newspapers, a group of citizens, led by Mark Twain and Augustus Saint Gaudens, formed the Lincoln Farm Association. One thousand dollars bought both cabin and farm, and in 1905 the Lincoln logs were loaded on a train for a nationally publicized trip back to Hodgenville.
Advance men worked the route, rousing festive crowds for each stop on the way. Solemn ceremonies were held along the railroad sidings. A few logs would be unveiled, men would doff their hats, and children would be hoisted to touch the sacred wood. After the train pulled into Hodgenville, a brass band serenaded the logs as they were trucked back to Sinking Spring. A crowd of several thousand followed behind.
To protect the cabin, the association commissioned a memorial from the Neoclassical architect John Russell Pope. His Greek temple rests at the summit of a grand stairway of 56 steps, one for each year of the martyr's life. Inside the temple, in a sanctum sanctorum, the cabin was reassembled. The only hitch came when the temple was nearly finished. Pope decided the cabin was too big for the hall in which it was placed. (Please note: He didn't decide the hall was too small for the cabin.) The logs, of course, were sacred -- but not so sacred that they couldn't be cut to fit. So workmen lopped two feet off each log, and the cabin was grouted back together, having assumed more tasteful dimensions.
Since then, many millions have passed through the heavy bronze doors to see the cabin's teetering chimney and rickety walls. It wasn't until a few years ago that proof came of what skeptics had long suspected. Party poopers and buzzkillers hired by the History Channel took core samples of the logs and discovered that the cabin Dennett had reclaimed from the wilderness dated only to the 1850s -- 40 years after Lincoln's birth. Today park rangers take care to tell visitors that the cabin is "symbolic."
We shouldn't mind. Over the past century, Lincoln has been the subject of unending historical controversy; partisans and historians alike try to claim him as liberal or conservative, racist or abolitionist, even gay or straight. The cabin transcends all such questions. It draws our attention instead to an undeniably American truth: Lincoln really was born in poverty, and he really did rise from it, through hard work and strength of character, to become one of the great men of history. And when such an American miracle occurs, there will always be an Alfred Dennett nearby, trying to make it pay.
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Mr. Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of "Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America" (Atlantic Monthly Press).
