Note i-57 — Chapter I · PINCHING TIMES
Reading edition
In response to the writer’s inquiries Henry B. Rankin of Springfield, Illinois, at one time a clerk in Lincoln and Herndon’s office, furnished a statement that is of topographical interest. The communication was addressed to the Hon. James R. B. Van Cleave of that city, through whose courtesy it is here published:
“The route Mr. Lincoln went over, in and out of Springfield from Salem when he made his home in that village was entirely on the south side of the Sangamon river, not the north as the travel from that vicinity has been for the past fifty years. There was no bridge over the Sangamon river in its entire length while Mr. Lincoln was at Salem. The first bridge over this river was built in the early ’40s at the then Carpenter’s Mills in this county. The next at Petersburg a few years later, in the ’40s, and via Athens in 1843.
“Mr. Lincoln’s trips to Springfield were usually made by the road as now located, for the first few miles bearing south out from Salem,—from that on into the city there have been more or less minor changes since, at various places,—on to the junction with the present ‘Jacksonville and Springfield road,’ and via it, entered the city on the west. Quite occasionally he walked from Salem to Springfield, and these trips were ‘across country,’ skirting the bluffs and breaks on the south bank of the Sangamon river ‘as the crow flies,’—by shortest angles, some five miles shorter trip in.
“I have heard Mr. Lincoln in the old Lincoln and Herndon law office refer to these trips on foot into the city across the then unfenced prairie and woods. So many writers about Mr. Lincoln’s early years have traveled over the road from Springfield to Petersburg via Athens,—now the nearest and always chosen one,—that you will please pardon me for the stress I place on the difference between the two roads. The road south of Salem across the ‘Rocky ford’ of ‘Rock Creek,’ and several other streams,—then called ‘creeks,’ had to bear westerly after leaving the Sangamon bottoms south of Salem, and cross these creeks at the most favorable places between banks best fitted to span crude bridges over. This made the ‘foot-path way’ from Springfield to Salem, a much shorter one than the wagon road between them. This wagon road as then traveled was fully twenty-five miles between Salem and the Capital City.”