Part 3

The Bowling Green farm passed into the possession of strangers. Many years ago the cabin of hewn logs was moved from under the brow of the bluff down to the bank of the river and turned into a stable. More than eighty years old now, this primitive structure that was Lincoln’s home for three years, still stands. Every spring it is threatened by freshets. You look across the flooded bottom land to where it stands among cottonwoods and willows, and think--and think--that this crumbling ruin, its squared logs worn and shrunken and parted, its clapboard roof curled, its crazy door sagging from the post, rang to that cry of desolation of our country’s hero-martyr. He lies under a towering marble monument at Springfield, twenty miles away. There is his crown of glory; here his Gethsemane.

Illustration: Photograph by C. U. Williams, Bloomington, Ill.

_The grave of Ann Rutledge, Oakland Cemetery, Petersburg, Illinois._

Twenty years ago Ann Rutledge was brought in from the country burying-ground and laid in Oakland Cemetery, in Petersburg. Only a field boulder marks the mound to-day, but the young girls of the city and county, who claim her as their own, are to celebrate Lincoln’s centennial year by setting up a slender shaft of Carrara marble over the grave of Lincoln’s lost love. Around her, on that forest-clad bluff, lie Old Salem neighbours. It is a cheerful place, where gardeners mow the grass and sweep the gravelled roadways, where carriages drive in the park-like enclosure on Sunday afternoons and flowers are laid lavishly on new-made graves. Bird-haunted, robins chirp in the blue grass and woodpeckers drum on the tree-trunks; bluebirds, tanagers and orioles, those jewels of the air with souls, flash across the sunlit spaces, and the meadow-lark trills joyously from a near-by field of clover.

No longer is she far away and alone, in cold and darkness and storm, where he could not bear to think of her, but lying here among old friends, in dear familiar scenes, under enchantment of immortal youth and deathless love, on this sunny slope, asleep....

Flow gently, sweet Sangamon; disturb not her dream.

NOTE

There are two descriptions of Ann Rutledge, one by W. H. Herndon. The other, not so well known, is by T. G. Onstot, son of Henry Onstot, the New Salem cooper, in his “Pioneers of Mason and Menard.” Mr. Onstot is still living, at the age of eighty in Mason City, Illinois, the sole survivor of the historic settlement on the Sangamon, and an unquestioned authority on the history of the region. He was six years old when Ann Rutledge died. He does not profess to remember her personally, but to have got her description from his father and mother. The families were next-door neighbours for a dozen years, and life-long friends. Herndon lived in Springfield. Mr. Onstot’s description is used here as, in all probability, the correct one, for this reason, and also because it is more in keeping with the character of Ann Rutledge, as revealed in her tragic story.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

Pg 51, paragraph 2 - ‘yath’ replaced with ‘path’ (an avalanche on its path)

End of Project Gutenberg's Lincoln's Love Story, by Eleanor Atkinson