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Historians researching the life and times of
Springfield merchant Seth Tinsley have uncovered new information about
another famous Springfield resident. What they’ve discovered may come as a shock to
thousands of people who’ve toured a downtown landmark. It turns out that the renovated Lincoln-Herndon Law
Offices, at Sixth and Adams streets downtown, said to be where Abraham
Lincoln practiced law from 1843 until the early 1850s, are in the wrong
location, says site manager Justin Blandford. More than 36,000 schoolchildren, tourists, and history buffs visit the
downtown attraction each year. The building is included in all Lincoln
tourist-related literature, it’s been featured on a limited-edition
Christmas ornament by the city of Springfield, and the law offices even
merited a mention by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama when he made his
presidential-announcement speech from the steps of the nearby Old State
Capitol in February. Blandford’s team made the discovery while they
pursued plans to re-create the Tinsley dry-goods store that was located in
the building in anticipation of the 2009 bicentennial of Lincoln’s
birth. The project calls for actors and guides in period costume, who will
provide living-history tours on subjects ranging from the textiles industry
to westward expansion and the temperance movement.
But in researching the Tinsley business the
preservationists got a history lesson of their own.
In 2006, Blandford assembled a research team, which
included historians, an architect, and an archaeologist, to find out as
much as they could about the building’s original owner, Tinsley, and
his influence in Springfield’s mercantile community.
Kathleen Thomas, a historical researcher, began examining newspaper
advertisements, looking closely at the kinds of items sold in his store,
S.M. Tinsley & Co. Blandford explains: “It’s sort of like a
Target ad today. When you pick up the Target ad, you never look at where
Target is located, and you always look at what’s on sale. Once we
were really trying to thoroughly investigate the [Tinsley] ads, we noticed
some kind of alarming things.”
One newspaper notice announcing the grand opening of
Tinsley’s shop in the Springfield
Register newspaper on May 14, 1841, boasts,
“the most extensive and desirable stock” of spring and summer
goods “in the Western country.” Another, dated Oct. 20, 1843,
advertises the arrival of “$30,000 worth of new goods.”
At least two Tinsley ads, although they don’t
give an address, mention that the store — which also contained office
space that Tinsley rented to the federal courts, the U.S. Postal Service,
and several attorneys, most famously Lincoln and his partner William
Herndon — is four stories tall. This raised more doubts, Blandford says. “If he’s advertising a four-story new
store, how is it possible for him to rent that space to attorneys?”
Blandford asks. “So some of Tinsley’s ads started to call into
question the location of law offices in the building.”
From there, Thomas went back and started looking at
Lincoln ads from around the time he first rented space in the building in
1843 to around 1853 when he moved out. But none of those notices indicates
that his office is in the same building as Tinsley’s dry-goods store.
If his office had been in the same building, historians say they believe
Lincoln’s ads would have said so, based on what other lawyers did at
the time. During the time Lincoln partnered with Stephen Logan,
they placed an ad in the newspaper stating that their offices were on the
third story over the post office, which was located at the southern end of
the building, not the northern end. Other anecdotal evidence includes the reminiscences of
William Herndon, who states that their office was “near the
square,” not on it, which Blandford says would have been a key
detail.
In other words, there’s no way Lincoln’s
office was on the north end of the building. It was on the southern end, a
few hundred feet away.
“I don’t like to think of like that way.
We’re lucky to have the building at all,” Blandford says when
asked who’s to blame for the geographical blunder. He credits three local families with saving the
building, located at what is now Sixth and Adams Streets, from demolition
in the 1960s. In the mid-1980s, the second and third floors were renovated
on the basis of the best evidence available to historians at the time, much
of which was folkloric, to determine where Lincoln’s office might
have been. Now that researchers are armed with the new
information, there is a chance that things can be made right in time for
the Emancipator’s birthday party. Doing so won’t be cheap,
however. The IHPA has requested $1 million of the state’s capital
spending bill, which remains tied up in the Legislature, to purchase and
restore Tinsley’s shop to what they believe it looked like in
Lincoln’s time. Blandford characterizes the project as an investment,
not an expense. “It’s all about putting people inside the
Lincoln situation,” says IHPA spokesman Dave Blanchette.
“They’re not spectators; they’re participants in history.
You learn much more by experiencing than you do walking by and reading.
It’s all about the Lincoln experience.”
Blandford says the Tinsley Project living-history
interpretation would be an important connector with the Abraham Lincoln
Presidential Library and Museum and other historic sites that would
encourage people to spend more time in the capital city or to visit more
often. “We could do an exhibit that might need to be
re-created in 15 years, or we could chart a new course. The research should
never stop. It should grow and improve as we learn more about Lincoln and
his lifetime,” Blandford says.
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@Illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2007.
