In July 2001, I fulfilled a lifelong desire to visit Abraham Lincoln's hometown in Springfield, Illinois.  Here are a few pictures from that trip. 

Here is Lincoln's house where he lived during the more than dozen years prior to his departure to become president. 

We are looking at the front and side of the house now.  His funeral procession in 1865 passed in front of his home on its way to Oak Lawn Cemetery across town.

You have to wait about 90 minutes to get into the Lincoln home for the tour guided by the US Department of the Interior Park Rangers. 

While in the home, you proceed along a grey carpet until you come to the front stairs, here in view. 

At this point, the rangers ask the tour group to proceed up the stairs and to hold on to the banister for safety's sake. 

After that announcement, they point out the banister dates back to the 1840s and is the same one used by the Lincolns.  The rangers joke that "that's the only historic thing you can touch here."

While much, but not all, of the home's furnishings belonged to the Lincolns, this is the original cast iron stove they used to prepare their meals and heat their irons.

We often think of Lincoln as a humble man who became a great statesman.  I guess so, but Mother Nature tends to humble the great as well as the rest of us!

Here's the Lincoln outhouse--they did not have indoor plumbing.