Lincoln (lĭn′kŭn), a city of England, on the Witham, 42 miles from Hull and 130 from London. There are important foundries and other manufactories and an active trade in flour. The horse-fair held every spring is one of the largest in the world, but the chief glory of Lincoln is its cathedral, admitted to be among the finest in England. It measures 524 by 82 feet or 250 feet across the transepts, and in style is mainly Early English. Population nearly 50,000.
Lincoln, Ill., city, county-seat of Logan County, about 28 miles noitheast of Springfield. It is in an agricultural section, and in the vicinity are extensive deposits of coal. The chief manufactures are mattresses, caskets, coffins, horse-collars, cellulose, excelsior and flour. Lincoln has good schools, a Carnegie Library, two hospitals, the Odd Fellows' Orphans' Home, Lincoln University (Pres.) and the state Institution for the Feeble Minded. Lincoln has the service of three railroads. Population 10,892.
Lincoln, Neb., capital of the state and county-seat of Lancaster County. Population 43,973. Lincoln is the chief railroad center of Nebraska. It has a large wholesale business in groceries and other merchandise, coal, lumber, steam and water machinery supplies and an extensive trade in agricultural implements. It is the chief center of the grain-trade of the state, and has the largest creamery establishment in the United States. Lincoln owns its waterworks. The state home for friendless children, the state penitentiary and the state asylum for the insane are located here. The city is noted for schools and colleges, constituting it one of the chief educational centers of the west. In addition to an excellent system of public schools, here are located the University of Nebraska (which see), Nebraska Wesleyan University (Methodist), Cotner University (Christian), Union college (Adventist), Lincoln Academy, St. Theresa high school and musical and business colleges.
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| ABRAHAM LINCOLN |
Lincoln, Abraham. The greatest men are those whose fame cannot be wholly accounted for by their public acts. What Lincoln was is incomparably greater than anything he did. Pre-eminent as is his place in history, he conveys the idea of duty rather than of glory. In moral height and in human service he measures up to the immortals of all ages. As he looms ever larger in the perspective of time, we constantly marvel and rejoice that he does not recede to a dim, legendary figure, but grows clearer in outline, closer in human sympathy. His simple goodness — his honesty, courage, kindness, duty and love for humanity — we revere and know that we may emulate.
Nothing else that ever happened so justifies belief in the capacity of the common people for self-government, as the fact that Lincoln's great heart and brain sprang from poor, unlettered ancestry and were nourished in the sterile soil of backwoods life. Born in Hardin County, Kentucky, February 12, 1809, the pioneer era, with its comparative comforts, was just emerging from the Indian-fighting, hunting period of Daniel Boone. His log-cabin home, with its dirt floor, was but a grade better than an Indian lodge; his food and clothing were more often trophies of the chase than products of the soil. The school was nearly five miles distant, and the teacher competent to teach only reading, writing and elementary arithmetic. At 21 Lincoln possessed only six books — the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, Æsop's Fables, The Arabian Nights, a Life of Washington and the Statutes of Indiana. He had also, from seeing an occasional Louisville or Vincennes newspaper, committed a number of Henry Clay's speeches to memory.
The conditions of life in southern Indiana, whither the family removed in 1816, were as primitive as in Kentucky. Here, on the farm near Gentryville — now Lincoln City — near the Ohio River, Lincoln's brave young mother died for lack of medical attendance in 1818. The boy of nine helped his father, a cabinet-maker by trade, to make the rude coffin in which his mother was buried. Then he wrote his first letter, one to a circuit-riding preacher, asking him to stop on his next round and say a prayer over her grave. To his mother, who urged him to “learn all he could and be of some account in the world,” and to his capable stepmother, with her sympathy and insight, he owed much in the shaping of his character. Honesty, loyalty, affection, willing service and striving after every kind of good marked the 21 years he spent under his father's various roofs. For good measure he added six months to help the family establish themselves in the new home on Sangamon River, Illinois, in 1830. He helped build the cabin, cleared land for corn and split walnut rails to fence the clearing. Thirty years later some of those rails, carried into the convention at Chicago by John Hanks, his relative, helped win for him the nomination for the presidency. Little he thought of such a thing when, in the autumn of 1830, he tied his extra shirts and home-knit socks in a big cotton handkerchief and turned his face to the nearest settlement - New Salem — to begin life as a man.
