She Slept In The Lincoln Bedroom As A Kid

Lincoln cabin in Illinois.

This is a lovely article by Candice Fleming, children's author, including an personal anecdote about growing up in Illinois. She is currently working on a book about  Lincoln. http://www.readingrockets.org/books/interviews/flemingc/transcript/

Sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom

Lincoln's 200th birthday is in February and I think it's a great time for everyone to look at America's past, to look at America's story. Not just Abraham Lincoln, but history in general. It's a good reflective time. It's interesting. It's a huge anniversary for a lot of other things. Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln share the same birthday, so it's his 200th birthday, too. I also think it's a time to rethink our approach to American history a little bit — to freshen it up so to speak.

Candice Fleming

I always worry that people think, well, history never changes and it's facts and we know what we know. It's completely not true. The anniversary of Abraham Lincoln is the perfect example of how history changes, how old information is reconsidered, how new information is discovered. You would think we knew everything about Abraham Lincoln and we don't.
I mean, Abraham Lincoln is the person most people write — has been most written about in American history. You would think that with all those books, with all those people doing all that research, you would think that we knew everything about Lincoln. It's completely not true.
It's a wonderful time to go back and reexamine Lincoln, I think. Time to look at him not just as the legendary Lincoln but as a person just like you and I. When I was working on The Lincolns, one of the biggest goals of that biography was to introduce Lincoln the way I know Lincoln. It's not like I'm 200 years old, although my sons might tell you I was.
For me, I wanted to show Lincoln, the human. When I was growing up, I actually grew up in central Illinois. If you've ever been to central Illinois or you grew up in central Illinois, you know that Abraham Lincoln is a presence there. He is alive and living everyday.
He's everywhere you go and you live with him. He's a neighbor. He is somebody that just goes with you everywhere you go everyday. For example, my friends and I would ride our bikes out to the Lincoln log cabin, which was about two miles out of town, and it was the place where Tom and Sara Bush Lincoln built their cabin when they moved to Illinois in 1830.
In the '70s when I was a kid, it was a state park but the state of Illinois wasn't giving it much love. There wasn't a park ranger there. There wasn't a visitor's center. You would go to the log cabin and if the door was unlocked, you could go in and if it wasn't, you didn't go in.
As kids, we would ride out there and the door would be unlocked. We'd go in and we'd play in the loft and we'd play in the root cellar, and a couple times we actually tried to start a fire in the fireplace which was unsuccessful, luckily.
But you think about this. You're actually playing in the Lincoln log cabin and playing house! No one cared. If we got bored with the Lincoln log cabin, we would ride out to Shiloh Cemetery, which was about a half a mile away, and that's the place where Tom and Sara Lincoln are buried.
We'd hang out there. We'd sit against the gravestone and we'd eat peanut butter crackers. He really was everywhere. My best friend Emily, at the time, she had a house that Lincoln had slept in and, actually, her bedroom was the same room that Lincoln had slept in.
I always say from fifth grade to eighth grade every Friday night, I slept in the Lincoln bedroom. As a kid, you kind of didn't notice it. He was just a presence. He was so familiar. In central Illinois, we have the habit of marking everything, which is why it's called the Land of Lincoln.
Every street corner is marked. If Lincoln was there, we marked it. We have a plaque, "Lincoln dug a well here." "Lincoln was a little," you know, "bully here." "Lincoln bought a hut here." "Lincoln got off the train here." "Lincoln spat on the sidewalk here." We mark it.
You live with that day-to-day. When I approached Lincoln, he felt like a neighbor. He wasn't that legendary figure — the now mythological hero. He really was just a neighbor. I thought that's the Lincoln that I wanna introduce young readers to because that's the Lincoln I think is important to remember. That he was a man just like us; a human being just like us. Flawed. Flawed. That's what greatness really is.