The historic New Salem was a short-lived settlement. It was platted in 1829 and was abandoned barely twelve years later. New Salem’s claim to fame is that a young Abraham Lincoln lived here between 1831-1837. Then he, along with the rest of the population, left the settlement. Lincoln went to Springfield. Many others went to Petersburg.

While living in New Salem 23-year-old Lincoln ran for the Illinois General Assembly in 1832. He won the New Salem precinct but lost the countywide district election. He ran again in 1834 and this time he won. Politics was not the mainstay of Lincoln’s life in New Salem. It is known that he was a shopkeeper, general store owner, postmaster, land surveyor, boatman, and rail splitter. In addition, he went off for three months to serve in the Black Hawk War.

 

The settlement became an archaeological site, to all intents and purposes – or at least an abandoned town. In the 1930s and 1940s (during the Great Depression) the Civilian Conservation Corps undertook the recreate the village in what many critics describe an imaginative or inauthentic exercise. Nevertheless, with the help of a very interesting exhibition script in the visitor center and a path through residential log cabins, stores, tradesmen’s shops, a tavern, a school, a wool carding mill and a saw and gristmill the visitor does have a sense of a what a little pioneer town on the prairie might have looked like. This appreciation of early nineteenth-century life is aided by reenactors who are occasionally scattered among the buildings. The really ambitious visitor can engage with the controversy surrounding representation at New Salem in an article by one of America’s most famous cultural anthropologists, Edward M. Bruner, ‘Lincoln’s New Salem as a Contested Site” published in Museum Anthropology, vol. 17, no. 3, in October 1993. Regardless, New Salem is an official State Historic Site. The SHS has produced a very interesting orientation video to the Lincoln and the site. It was inscribed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.