Honestly? Abe deserves better, but it just doesn't seem like there's enough material to work with…read morehere, which may not necessarily be anyone's fault. My top-tier chum who literally went to the school of hospitality and I came by here last Thursday in the late morning at my request. I love presidential shizzle - one of my earliest memories is getting a book of the presidents and learning all of them in order, and instead of going to Disney World (don't get me started), my parents took me to a number of presidential homesteads and birthplaces when I was in elementary school, mostly the heavy hitters in VA and the Adams one in Braintree, MA. And I've legitimately celebrated President's Day by dragging some of my chums to Grant's Tomb at 9AM to listen to a reenactment of the 1873 State of the Union. So I came into this with some nerdy, executive branch street cred. Part of it was definitely the mediocre rainy weather, but I just wasn't that impressed.
I want to emphasize that there might not have been anything the National Park Service could have done once they got involved, because the biggest issue here is that the actual birthplace doesn't really exist anymore. I'm sure they got the land/property lines correct, but the log cabin that we all naturally associate with Abe? Gone, so you have to settle for a recreation, and that recreated cabin isn't given its own space outside - it's housed in the Memorial Building, which makes that experience more claustrophobic than it should be, since the cabin takes up about 70% of the room. There may be excellent reasons why it had to remain indoors, but I found that decision pretty curious. And bottom line - it's hard to have a national park based on a birthplace that's largely abstract and not something you can see with your own eyes.
The Visitors Center was relatively small but pleasant. I haven't stopped to think about it until now, but I'm guessing that the vast majority of Lincoln exhibits are at his home in Springfield, IL, which I know DOES physically exist. Again, they just didn't have as much to play around with here so they're relying more on fancy/tasteful Lincoln quotes on their walls versus, say, a glass case featuring his top hat. When a sizeable chunk of your Visitors Center is taken up by a gift shop and little movie theater showing a 15-minute video about Lincoln, you're pretty much broadcasting the fact that you don't have a lot of standalone items to display, which is a shame.
The biggest selling point is the Memorial Building, notwithstanding the replica cabin situation inside. It's built up on a hill with 56 steps for each year of Abe's life, and bares a pretty strong resemblance to the more notable Presidential memorials in DC. I thought it was cool that several Presidents have stopped by, now knowing that this is a bit in the middle of nowhere, but it's also just an hour outside Lexington so it was also disappointing to learn that no Presidents have visited since Eisenhower. They can't fit in a 15-minute photo op over the course of four to eight years? Come on. It's Abe.
The NPS rangers (right word?) were very nice. I'd be curious what the pecking order of historic sites is for the NPS but I have to think this isn't at the very tippy top. Regardless, lots of smiles and at least one of them went out of their way to ask us if we had any questions and to (unprompted) pull out a map to orient us before we left the Visitors Center to explore the grounds a bit.
If you're in the area, sure, pay your respects to the beginning of Honest Abe's story. But if you have more time/bandwidth, I think the play is to jump ahead in the timeline and get yourself up to Illinois.
