Lincoln Trail Homestead State Park & Memorial, Illinois, United States

5Taylor B 5:00 PM Jun 7, 2021

Site of Lincoln's first home in Illinois
Anything associated with Abraham Lincoln is worth reading or visiting. Some historic sites are well known. Some aren't. Like the Lincoln Trail Homestead. Located at 705 Spitler Park Drive in Mount Zion, Illinois, near Harristown, 10 miles west of Decatur, it is a 162-acre state park located on the Sangamon River in Macon County. It is believed to contain the site of the homestead where from March 1830 to March 1831 pioneer Thomas Lincoln lived with 12 members of his extended family, including grown son Abraham Lincoln. The Lincolns moved to this location from Indiana. But after a harsh winter, Thomas Lincoln moved to a farm near Charleston. Abraham Lincoln hired out as a flatboatman on the Sangamon River and established a new home for himself in New Salem, near Petersburg. Today, the park serves as a picnic area for the greater Decatur metropolitan area and contains a pioneer cemetery and the remains of a flour mill and dam on the Sangamon River. Curiously, while there is a tablet that marks the location of Lincoln's first home in Illinois, archeologists have not yet discovered any evidence of the exact site of the Lincoln family's 1830-1831 cabin. However, there is evidence that this is where a 21-year-old Abraham Lincoln split rails for his father's 10-acre field and also hired out to split rails for neighboring pioneer farmers, thus inspiring his later political nickname, the Rail Splitter.