Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial

Abraham Lincoln

Dennis Hanks

Elizabeth Johnston Hanks

Nancy Hanks Lincoln

Sarah Bush Johnston Lincoln

Sarah Lincoln Grigsby

Thomas Lincoln

In his Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, a re-elected President Abraham Lincoln wanted to unify a broken nation. With the end of the Civil War within sight, many people on both sides felt anger and frustration toward their fellow Americans. Lincoln attempted to rise above the divisiveness and start the process of healing. Heralded as one of the most significant presidential speeches in American history, its meaning and eloquence still resonate with people today.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s … Environman? While it may sound like a Saturday morning superhero, Environman was a National Park Service (NPS) symbol for its environmental education activities in the 1970s. Beginning in 1967 the NPS became a leader in environmental conservation education, which then-Director George B. Hartzog, Jr saw as crucial to the survival of the parks and the planet. Many of those key ideas echo in today’s NPS climate change education.

Learn about the "amazing" flatboat journey Abraham Lincoln took when he was 19 years old. Abraham Lincoln and Allen Gentry had many obstacles to face before starting their trip as well as during their trip to New Orleans, LA. Learn about their trip and find your way through the maze.

Opportunities to attend school were scarce on the frontier when Abraham Lincoln was young boy. He later said his education was acquired "by littles" and "did not amount to one year."

Abraham Lincoln lived in Indiana for 14 years, from age 7-21. He grew up on this southern Indiana soil.

Birds are an important part of the world we live in. Around 43% of bird species that breed at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial are in decline in the region. The Heartland Inventory and Monitoring Network measures changes in birds and their habitats to determine the health of bird communities and park ecosystems. This information can help managers take effective steps to protect park habitat.

Behind the scenes at every NPS memorial site, a team of preservation professionals works to plan, design, and specify the type of treatment that is needed to preserve the physical place and the associated memories. Here are just a few examples of commemorative landscapes in the Midwest Region along with their treatment documents.

Although the abolition of slavery emerged as a dominant objective of the Union war effort, most Northerners embraced abolition as a practical measure rather than a moral cause. The war resolved legally and constitutionally the single most important moral question that afflicted the nascent republic, an issue that prevented the country from coalescing around a shared vision of freedom, equality, morality, and nationhood.