In 1831, Abraham Lincoln arrived at the New Salem grist mill along the Sangamon River aboard a flatboat that was sinking.
Lincoln had been hired by a man named Denton Offutt to deliver the boat cargo to New Orleans. As the story goes, Offutt was so impressed by Lincoln’s quick thinking to rescue the boat and save the cargo that he offered him a job at a shop he planned to open in New Salem. Lincoln returned from the cargo trip and decided to stay in New Salem, about 20 miles northwest of Springfield.
By the time Lincoln left the town in 1837, he was a state legislator and his political career was taking off. While New Salem was essentially abandoned in the years after Lincoln departed for Springfield and then Washington, D.C., it was reconstructed during the 1930s as an historic site that last year attracted almost 400,000 visitors.
But time has taken a toll on the state’s effort to memorialize Lincoln in the town where he developed his political chops.
Lincoln’s New Salem State Historic Site has fallen into disrepair as the tab for deferred maintenance on properties managed by the Illinois Department of Natural Resources has grown to an estimated $1 billion statewide, according to IDNR spokesperson Jayette Bolinski.
In recent years, the roofs of two structures have caved in. The grist mill, where townspeople would grind wheat into flour, is closed, with boards across the entryway. There are holes in the wooden entrance ramp, and the mill’s drive shaft, which powered the structure, has been inoperable since a 2016 flood.
Gina Gillmore-Wolter, president of the New Salem Lincoln League, said it’s unsafe for schoolchildren to walk along the road, or over the closed pedestrian bridge, to reach the mill.
When responsibility for the site, along with all other state historic sites, was shifted to IDNR from The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency in 2017, New Salem stopped getting $200,000 annually from the state capital fund. At the same time IDNR was suffering form almost two decades of disinvestment, Bolinski said.
However, efforts are underway to restore New Salem. IDNR announced this week that the site will receive about $8 million in funding for improvements from the Rebuild Illinois capital plan for improvements. The site has received a total of about $3 million in capital funding since Gov. JB Pritzker took office in 2019.
In addition, Republican state Sen. Steve McClure, who represents the area, is leading a bipartisan legislative effort to rehabilitate the site in coordination with the New Salem Lincoln League. Legislation made up of three separate bills would create a New Salem Preservation Commission under IDNR to assess the site and provide a budget to fix the structures. The measure would also create a procurement exception because of the difficulty to find tradespeople with construction skills similar to those used in the 1830s that are needed to properly rebuild the structures, according to Republican Rep. Wayne Rosenthal, the legislation’s House sponsor.
IDNR estimates it will cost $19 million to rehabilitate the site, far higher than the $5 million specified in the legislation. An amendment will be added to update this cost, according to McClure, along with other amendments to require IDNR to conduct an immediate assessment of the site and report back to the General Assembly within 30 days.
The department does not support the creation of a preservation commission as laid out in the legislation, saying in a statement that doing so would create an unnecessary layer of “bureaucracy and red tape.” However, it has “offered to enter into a ‘Friends’ arrangement with the Lincoln League, which would help meet our shared goals without creating undue additional bureaucracy,” the statement said.
McClure said he thinks the IDNR is concerned if the New Salem site is fully funded, IDNR would have to provide similar help to every other site it oversees.
“Well, in my view New Salem is the most important state historic site,” McClure said. “This site, where (Lincoln’s) whole political career began, has sort of been just falling into the abyss, and we’ve got to protect it.”
McClure said the grist mill where Lincoln first arrived is the project’s top priority.
“The shape it’s in is pretty urgent,” McClure said during a recent tour of the site, pointing to a splintered piece of loose wood. “I mean look at this. That’s a safety hazard.”
“If that’s what we’re doing to maybe one of the most important structures in the village, why even have the site open?” he asked.
The mill is largely inaccessible. The pedestrian bridge that connects the structure, located down the hill from the town and over a highway, is closed. New stairs were added about a year ago, but they stop halfway down the hill. Gillmore-Wolter said the area isn’t safe for school field trips.
“You’re going to have to make some kind of parking that’s got a guardrail that’s safe for kids on school trips to access this because they tore out the stairs that came to this and you can see the new stairs, but they blocked them off,” Gillmore-Wolter said. “They’re like the stairs that go nowhere.”
The roofs on two structures, the Trent Barn which was owned by the ferry operator Alexander Trent, and the carding mill, where townspeople would “card,” or comb, wool from their sheep, have also collapsed.
The carding mill is the only animal-powered carding mill in the United States, according to Gillmore-Wolter. When she visited the site as a kid in the 1970s and ’80s, there were oxen powering the mill.
In Lincoln’s time, people in the town would shear their sheep, wash the fleece and card the wool using the mill. Then it would be straightened and spun into thread and yarn.
“This is the beginning of the industrial revolution when we started taking that process out of the home where people would sit for a week to card the same amount of wool that you could take there and have it done in a few hours,” Gillmore-Wolter said.
The roofs were damaged from exposure to moisture, which led to deterioration and rot. Now that the roofs are gone, that will speed the same process for the rest of the structure, Rosenthal said.
“When you lose the roof and then the other logs stay wet all the time, they’re going to deteriorate,” Rosenthal said. “This is going to continue on this building and you’re going to see this continue to all the structures here unless they’re properly repaired and taken care of. Right now they’re not.”
The site has seven employees, and Rosenthal said a bigger staff is needed to help manage and maintain the park, which also includes a campground and trails.
Gillmore-Wolter said she remembers when the site was bustling with period reenactments.
“You would come through here and there would be people dipping candles. There would be people making soap. There would be people cooking over the open fires. The blacksmith would be hammering in the blacksmith shop,” Gillmore-Wolter said.
McClure said the site’s introductory video has not been working for the past few months, despite investments in new equipment by the New Salem Lincoln League.
“That’s pathetic,” McClure said of the video not working. “This is where President Abraham Lincoln, one of the most famous people to ever live, started his career in politics, and you can’t even watch the introductory video.”
The Lincoln League and The Abraham Lincoln Association led an effort in 2019 to request state funding for repairs, but they didn’t file any legislation, and the COVID-19 pandemic ended the effort, according to Gillmore-Wolter.
McClure expects continued bipartisan support for his legislation, which has backing from at least two Chicago Democrats, Sen. Bill Cunningham and Sen. Robert Peters.
In addition to its historical importance, the site provides a boost to the small town of Petersburg just to the north, said David Blanchette, a local journalist who has been involved in area museums including the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield. Blanchette said the site is “very peaceful.”
“There are tree-lined pathways that you can walk down,” Blanchette said. “There’s a lot of economic impact too when tourists come to the community and spend money at restaurants and gas stations and convenience stores and overnight lodging and that translates into jobs and revenue for the community.”
New Salem attracted 359,950 visitors to the community in 2024 and 374,418 visitors in 2023 according to Bolinski.
For others who grew up in the area, it provides a direct connection to the past. Gillmore-Wolter learned that her great-great-great-great-uncle, Alexander Ferguson, was Lincoln’s shoe cobbler in the town.
“They’re not just names on a page anymore, they become real people with a story, so that’s the motivating factor for me,” she said.
