Lincoln Home

The Lincoln Home in Springfield, Illinois, is the only home Abraham Lincoln ever owned — the house where he lived for seventeen years as a lawyer, state politician, and family man before the presidency transformed his life and the nation's. Here the Lincolns raised their sons, and from here Lincoln departed in 1861 for Washington, never to return alive. Preserved with much of its original furnishings amid a restored 19th-century neighborhood, it offers an intimate portrait of Lincoln before he became the Great Emancipator.

Abraham Lincoln bought the house at Eighth and Jackson Streets in Springfield in 1844, for about $1,500, a few years after marrying Mary Todd. Built in 1839, it was the only home Lincoln would ever own. Over the next seventeen years he lived there while building a successful law practice and a political career, and the Lincolns enlarged the modest cottage into a comfortable two-story Greek Revival house in 1856.

The home was the center of the Lincolns' family life. Three of their four sons were born while the family lived here, and it was in this house that their young son Eddie died in 1850. Neighbors knew Lincoln as a devoted if famously informal father, and the house saw his rise from prairie lawyer to national figure during the bitter national debates over slavery in the 1850s.

In 1860 Lincoln was elected president, and in February 1861 he bade farewell to Springfield, telling his neighbors he did not know when, or whether, he would return. He never came back alive: after his assassination in 1865, his funeral train carried him home to Springfield for burial. The family rented out and later donated the house; it became a National Historic Site in 1971 and is preserved, along with its restored neighborhood, by the National Park Service.