The Illinois Abraham Lincoln knew was a land of prairies and wildflowers, creeks and rivers, where dirt roads connected towns and farms.
“There were no bridges back then at all,” says landscape photographer Robert Shaw, whose book, “Abraham Lincoln Traveled This Way,” was released just before Feb. 12, the 203rd anniversary of Lincoln’s birth.
Subtitled “The America Lincoln Knew,” the book is a photographic reverie of the country’s landscape and architecture as Lincoln would have experienced it, including swimming a horse through the Mackinaw River on his way to Tremont, one of Lincoln’s stops on his rounds as a young attorney in central Illinois’ Eighth Judicial Circuit.
Michael Burlingame, the Lincoln scholar at the University of Illinois-Springfield, wrote the narrative and compiled the Lincoln quotes that accompany Shaw’s photos.
“We don’t have photos of what the Eighth Judicial Circuit looked like in the 1840s,” Burlingame says. “It gives us a sense of the world Lincoln saw.”
The book was featured in an February 12, 2012, article in The Peoria Journal Star.
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