Preservation and Me

In the fourth grade, we took a bus trip to sunny Springfield, Illinois. While I recall the drive itself boring (cornfields, everywhere), what we saw when we got there definitely was not. One of the first stops we made was a village with what appeared to be buildings based off of what the original settlers built. Clearly set up as a tourist attraction for fourth graders, we watched the paid actors do all sorts of daily activities that people in that time would have done. One of the chores they did that stood out in my mind was paper making. I had never seen paper be made before and it was a truly fascinating practice. We even got to keep a small, rough square. The next stop on the trip, and possibly the coolest one, was getting to see where Abraham Lincoln lived. The house still stands and is decorated just as it would have been in 1860. Interestingly enough, the building has been open to tours since 1887. Now, they only allow small groups to go through at a time, and only for about twenty minutes each. As I recall, we weren't allowed to go to certain rooms because they were either repairing them or there was water damage from recent floods that made them unsafe. But the outhouse was definitely still available for viewing, something that always gets an "ew, gross!" out of ten year olds. After Lincoln's home we traveled to a natural history museum (which compared to the Field Museum in Chicago was washed out and grey) and then to Lincoln's tomb.

As a child, and still now, I have a healthy respect for history and the need to preserve it for future generations, that we might learn from and try to understand the ways of other humans in the past. This trip for me was the first time I had been in a "restored" building and been exposed to the way things that we still can walk through and breath on (as opposed to things in a museum) should be treated. The rangers that guided us through the building watched us carefully to make sure we touched nothing and only walked where they told us to, large portions of rooms being roped off, visitors only allowed to peer in. At the time I didn't appreciate the history of the building or why they couldn't just make a new one that looks the same. To me, if it looked the same, it was the same. Now I can respect why original building materials are so precious and why I couldn't run around pretending to be Martha Lincoln.