Where did the Lincolns live after the Globe Tavern?

[Rob Wick]

Roger,

For the past year or so I've had a researcher going through the Beveridge papers in the Library of Congress for my Tarbell project. Nothing from Jacob Thompson (she's going through them alphabetically and just got through the "S's"). It will be a while (likely a couple of weeks at the earliest) before I will send her back. At that time I wouldn't mind having her copy that letter for me.

I did a quick search of Beveridge's book and he mentions the house on Fourth Street but, ironically, doesn't cite a source. I say ironically because Beveridge generally fetishized footnotes, in part because of his intense dislike for Tarbell's methods.

No access to the Illinois State Journal, however.

Best
Rob

[Susan Higginbotham]

I have access to the Illinois State Journal through Genealogy Bank, but I could not find the article by Vaughn in question in the November 12, 1927 issue. ("A Handful O' Sorts" was a regular column by Vaughn.)

I did find an article from 1930 about the Fourth Street Home, which I'll send to Roger since I can't post photos here anymore through Photobucket without paying a fee. The blog here mentions the 1930 article.

http://sangamoncountyhistory.org/wp/?p=10377

[RJNorton]

Thank you to all for your efforts on this!

[Steve]

If George Henry Helmle was the ultimate source that the Lincolns lived at Fourth Street (or Monroe) for a few months between living at the Globe and Jackson & Eighth (as indicated by the Burlingame citation), where did he get that information? George was born in 1853:

http://sangamoncountyhistory.org/wp/?p=10398

So, he couldn't have been an eyewitness. His family/parents aren't in the 1850 census in Springfield, but I did find George's parents', (William and Eliza Helmle), 20 Jan. 1851 marriage record from St. Louis, indicating they resided there at the time:

   

So George Helmle's information about the Lincolns' 1843-1844 home would have to come from another Springfield resident outside of his family.

Also, perhaps the William E. Barton papers should be checked for any correspondence relating to the Fourth Street address since Barton first published his book in 1925.

[Rob Wick]

The problem with going through the Barton papers is that the correspondence is separated by year and not by the recipient or the sender. There are 11 boxes of correspondence, not to mention the correspondence that is stored with various typescripts as well as others throughout the collection. I hired a researcher in Chicago and he started to go through and photograph the correspondence files. He quit five hours later after getting through the fourth folder of the first box.

Best
Rob

[RJNorton]

Neither the Barton account (1925) nor the Beveridge (1928) account mention a rent of $100 per year. Evans does not mention it either (1932). At some point in time this was added to the story of the little home (p. 103 of Baker's biography, for example). I wonder where the rent information came from because it's not mentioned in the early accounts.

[Rob Wick]

In a book called The Sangamon Saga published in 1976 and authored by Bruce Alexander Campbell, he notes that the Lincolns rented the house on 4th Street from Seth Tinsley (pg. 54). It was above his dry goods store where Lincoln and Herndon had their law office. I did a quick Google search on Tinsley and came up with an article that was published in the Springfield paper in 2006.

During the 1840s, when Abraham Lincoln and William Herndon practiced law at Sixth and Adams streets, Lincoln probably walked often through Seth Tinsley’s dry goods store on the first floor before going up, two steps at a time, to his own offices.
Tinsley owned the building, renting space to the two lawyers and others. He also ran a fat-rendering business, supplying Springfield with lard. At the time, the Tinsley name held its own, comparable to that of the entrepreneurial Bunns.
Eventually, however, Seth Tinsley fell into oblivion. Today, despite Tinsley’s diverse business interests in the mid-1800s and his proximity to Lincoln as a historical figure, little is known about the man. Vague rumors passed down through generations suggest he died in a fire.
But, as part of an ongoing project to recreate Tinsley’s dry goods store at the Lincoln-Herndon site, a clearer portrait of the man is beginning to emerge.
For one thing, Tinsley didn’t perish in a fire but died of kidney failure, according to Kathleen Thomas, the researcher hired to find out as much as possible about Tinsley and his store.
Thomas, a former film and humanities professor at Florida State and Florida A&M universities, moved to Springfield about six years ago. She briefly worked as a tour guide at the Old State Capitol before leaving to teach at Lincoln Land Community College.
Last year, the Old State Capitol Historic Site manager, Justin Blandford, who also manages the Lincoln-Herndon site as well as Vachel Lindsay’s home for the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, asked Thomas to return to IHPA on contract and lead the Tinsley research.
The job has led Thomas on a fascinating trail to the great-great granddaughter of Tinsley’s sister in Macomb and to the Harvard University library, where she found a dissertation on the mercantile climate of Springfield in the 1840s.
In the dissertation and files of Lincoln-era credit reports held at Harvard, Thomas uncovered a man with a lot of potential, but with serious weaknesses that prevented him from realizing them.
“A dashing, industrious, adventurous keen trader,” reads one creditor’s report of Tinsley that Thomas discovered - and which probably affected his ability to secure loans. “Has been drinking to excess latterly and a portion of his time unfit for business and his health is giving way.”
Lincoln was one of several Springfield leaders who wrote such reports for lenders. Thomas hasn’t found a report by Lincoln about Tinsley, but it would have been easy for him to write one, since he worked right above the merchant. There’s a credit report on Lincoln, too, Thomas says. But much of it has been blacked out.
Tinsley, who was married and had 11 children, never seemed to get a handle on all the ventures he was establishing. By the time his wife died in 1867, he must have been in desperate financial shape, since he appears to have signed over the guardianship of his children to relatives shortly after her death. He died the following year.
“He is the great American dream and tragedy,” Thomas says.
Thomas currently is reading through old diaries, looking for more clues to piece other aspects of Tinsley’s life together. Thomas’s next step is to find her holy grail, a photo of Tinsley’s dry goods store, to aid in the store’s reconstruction. That’s a project Blandford wants to have at least under way by 2009, when Springfield and the nation will be celebrating Lincoln’s bicentennial birthday.
The project will not affect the Tinsley Dry Goods gift shop, just south of the law offices on Sixth Street. That store is privately managed, but is owned by IHPA.
Inspired by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum, Blandford’s goal is to rewrite the presentations at the law offices and the Old State Capitol by telling the stories of the supporting characters in Lincoln’s life and finding ways to make such stories more appealing to younger audiences.
At the law offices, the focus, at least on the first floor, will be Tinsley. The presentation at the Old State Capitol has shifted from an emphasis on artifacts to the rivalry between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.
“We learn more about Lincoln by learning more about him from others,” Blandford says.
The Tinsley project won’t come cheaply. Thomas’s salary is funded by a grant from the Illinois Department of Commerce and Community Affairs as well as from IHPA and the Old State Capitol Foundation.
Blandford also has recruited an archeologist and architect to peel back the years on the first floor at the Lincoln-Herndon site. Currently, the first floor is a somewhat dated exhibit space.
Altogether, Blandford estimates that a high-quality recreation of the Tinsley store could cost as much as $750,000.
“It’s an ambitious goal,” Blandford conceded. “But it’s for ambitious men who worked here.”

And this was published in the next year by the Illinois Times:

Historians researching the life and times of Springfield merchant Seth Tinsley have uncovered new information about another famous Springfield resident. What they’ve discovered may come as a shock to thousands of people who’ve toured a downtown landmark. It turns out that the renovated Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices, at Sixth and Adams streets downtown, said to be where Abraham Lincoln practiced law from 1843 until the early 1850s, are in the wrong location, says site manager Justin Blandford. More than 36,000 schoolchildren, tourists, and history buffs visit the downtown attraction each year. The building is included in all Lincoln tourist-related literature, it’s been featured on a limited-edition Christmas ornament by the city of Springfield, and the law offices even merited a mention by U.S. Sen. Barack Obama when he made his presidential-announcement speech from the steps of the nearby Old State Capitol in February. Blandford’s team made the discovery while they pursued plans to re-create the Tinsley dry-goods store that was located in the building in anticipation of the 2009 bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth. The project calls for actors and guides in period costume, who will provide living-history tours on subjects ranging from the textiles industry to westward expansion and the temperance movement.
This room overlooking the Old State Capitol Plaza wasn't Lincoln's office after all.

But in researching the Tinsley business the preservationists got a history lesson of their own.
In 2006, Blandford assembled a research team, which included historians, an architect, and an archaeologist, to find out as much as they could about the building’s original owner, Tinsley, and his influence in Springfield’s mercantile community.
Kathleen Thomas, a historical researcher, began examining newspaper advertisements, looking closely at the kinds of items sold in his store, S.M. Tinsley & Co. Blandford explains: “It’s sort of like a Target ad today. When you pick up the Target ad, you never look at where Target is located, and you always look at what’s on sale. Once we were really trying to thoroughly investigate the [Tinsley] ads, we noticed some kind of alarming things.”
One newspaper notice announcing the grand opening of Tinsley’s shop in the Springfield Register newspaper on May 14, 1841, boasts, “the most extensive and desirable stock” of spring and summer goods “in the Western country.” Another, dated Oct. 20, 1843, advertises the arrival of “$30,000 worth of new goods.”
At least two Tinsley ads, although they don’t give an address, mention that the store — which also contained office space that Tinsley rented to the federal courts, the U.S. Postal Service, and several attorneys, most famously Lincoln and his partner William Herndon — is four stories tall. This raised more doubts, Blandford says. “If he’s advertising a four-story new store, how is it possible for him to rent that space to attorneys?” Blandford asks. “So some of Tinsley’s ads started to call into question the location of law offices in the building.”
From there, Thomas went back and started looking at Lincoln ads from around the time he first rented space in the building in 1843 to around 1853 when he moved out. But none of those notices indicates that his office is in the same building as Tinsley’s dry-goods store. If his office had been in the same building, historians say they believe Lincoln’s ads would have said so, based on what other lawyers did at the time. During the time Lincoln partnered with Stephen Logan, they placed an ad in the newspaper stating that their offices were on the third story over the post office, which was located at the southern end of the building, not the northern end. Other anecdotal evidence includes the reminiscences of William Herndon, who states that their office was “near the square,” not on it, which Blandford says would have been a key detail.
In other words, there’s no way Lincoln’s office was on the north end of the building. It was on the southern end, a few hundred feet away.
“I don’t like to think of like that way. We’re lucky to have the building at all,” Blandford says when asked who’s to blame for the geographical blunder. He credits three local families with saving the building, located at what is now Sixth and Adams Streets, from demolition in the 1960s. In the mid-1980s, the second and third floors were renovated on the basis of the best evidence available to historians at the time, much of which was folkloric, to determine where Lincoln’s office might have been. Now that researchers are armed with the new information, there is a chance that things can be made right in time for the Emancipator’s birthday party. Doing so won’t be cheap, however. The IHPA has requested $1 million of the state’s capital spending bill, which remains tied up in the Legislature, to purchase and restore Tinsley’s shop to what they believe it looked like in Lincoln’s time. Blandford characterizes the project as an investment, not an expense. “It’s all about putting people inside the Lincoln situation,” says IHPA spokesman Dave Blanchette. “They’re not spectators; they’re participants in history. You learn much more by experiencing than you do walking by and reading. It’s all about the Lincoln experience.”
Blandford says the Tinsley Project living-history interpretation would be an important connector with the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum and other historic sites that would encourage people to spend more time in the capital city or to visit more often. “We could do an exhibit that might need to be re-created in 15 years, or we could chart a new course. The research should never stop. It should grow and improve as we learn more about Lincoln and his lifetime,” Blandford says.

I looked in Ida Tarbell's papers as found no reference to Tinsley by name. Also, in her editions of her biography she doesn't even mention the Globe Tavern. Much of her Springfield research was done by J. McCann Davis and as I have stated often, much of her McClure's Magazine papers were destroyed in 1917 by the new owners of the magazine during a move of the company headquarters. All this leads me to wonder if some writer got it from one of Tinsley's descendants?

Best
Rob

[RJNorton]

The web page here also says the Lincolns rented their little home from Tinsley:

http://www.lawpracticeofabrahamlincoln.o..._1178.html

[RJNorton]

I found another "vote" for Tinsley although it's located in a piece of historical fiction. In Love is Eternal author Irving Stone writes:

"The following afternoon she (Mary Lincoln) noticed a farm wagon drawn up in front of a small cottage on Fourth Street, in the middle of the block between Adams and Monroe, and a family carrying its personal possessions out of the house. She learned from the woman of the family that the house had been sold, furnished, to Seth Tinsley. Mary went inside; there was a parlor into which one stepped from the street, behind that a kitchen with a small Empire stove; on the other side two bedrooms, the front one furnished with a plain four-poster and a wooden table, the smaller bedroom behind it empty and unpainted.

She walked quickly to Tinsley’s store, which sold raisins and molasses in addition to wallpaper and fancy silks twelve days from Philadelphia. Seth Tinsley was the town’s banker as well as merchant. Mary breathlessly explained her errand.

‘Well, Mrs, Lincoln, I was intending to sell . . . but if it's that important to you ...”

“Oh, Mr. Tinsley, it is. I’ll undertake to improve the place . . . how much would you charge for the rent?”

Tinsley computed figures in his head, said, “Furnished, five dollars a month.”

The hours passed slowly; she was in a fever of expectancy; yet when Abraham returned from Urbana she restrained herself until he had enjoyed a soak in the bathing room. Then she told him in one long breath, the welfare of the child intermingled with praise of the little house, and the fact that it would not be expensive . . .

Abraham took her in his arms and kissed her eager mouth.

“That’s quite an appeal to the jury, lawyer Todd. We’ll move first thing in the morning.”

[Rob Wick]

I spent a good bit of yesterday trying to find more information about Tinsley and who might have been the original source for this. What I found is that Tinsley was a pretty prominent citizen, serving on the city council in the 1850s, and then headed downward until his death in 1869. According to the Lincoln Lore bulletin put out by the Lincoln National Life Foundation, at the time of his death none of Tinsley's 11 children were living in Springfield.

In thinking about who was the original source it seems to me that it had to have been someone who either lived in Springfield at the time or was the relative of someone who did. Given that many of the Lincoln biographies skipped over it, including Tarbell, it likely wasn't known until Barton mentioned it in 1925. I looked over the Barton papers that I have and didn't find anything that might lead to a clue as to who was the original source. My guess is still that Barton, in his travels, met someone who was related to Tinsley and was told about how Lincoln rented property from Seth. I'm still amazed that Tarbell didn't talk about that, although that might be an example of her reticence to write about Mary at all.

Best
Rob

[RJNorton]

Rob, did Ida Tarbell ever communicate in person with Barton? I was wondering about the possibility that Robert Lincoln was told about the little place by his parents, and many years later Robert may have mentioned it to Ida. Ida never thought it important enough to write about but maybe told Barton about it if they ever met in person?

[Rob Wick]

Roger,

I wanted to look through all the letters between them before answering, and I'm glad I did. I didn't remember a face-to-face meeting but on July 10, 1926 Barton wrote Tarbell "I have been twice or thrice to Virginia since I met you in Chicago, and am getting bit by bit a little more knowledge of our mutual friends the Hankses." That is the only mention of a meeting between the pair that I am aware of. After that there were several invitations by Barton for Tarbell to come to Foxboro to see his Lincoln collection, but she never was able to make it.

I don't believe she gave him the information on the Fourth Street home because Barton's book came out in early 1925 (he was in Europe when it appeared) and from the 1926 letter I assume their meeting happened that year. She didn't respond to that letter until 1927 because she was in Italy doing her series on Benito Mussolini for McCall's. She doesn't mention their meeting in her 1927 response. She would have had to tell him sometime in 1924 before the book went to press, and their letters are full of back and forth over the legitimacy of Nancy Hanks, which as you know they vociferously disagreed about. It's interesting to me that Barton wrote Tarbell for the first time in 1920 and it took her nearly three years to respond. Somehow, his letter was misplaced and he thought he had somehow angered her. And today people get upset if a text isn't returned within an hour.

I also checked the correspondence from the Beveridge papers with Barton (I have the entire correspondence) and Barton was working on revisions after Beveridge successfully convinced Bobbs-Merrill in 1924 to publish the book, so Barton would have had to receive or find the information some time before the summer of 1924.

I noticed that Tarbell, in In The Footsteps of the Lincolns, did mention the stay at the Globe Tavern, but jumps over the Fourth Street home to the Eighth and Jackson home. So even then she didn't think it was of any importance, which is another reason I don't think she mentioned it to Barton.

I wonder if Herndon ever talked about it with his informants. I haven't checked the book yet or the book of letters that came out last year. It seems to me if I'm wrong about the Tinsley heirs that the next logical guess would be to put it to Herndon.

Best
Rob

[Steve]

Does Springfield have surviving property records from the time that can be checked for the location of the Tinsley cottage? I ask because of the claim that the cottage was on Monroe instead of Fourth Street.

[Rob Wick]

The person in charge of the Sangamon Valley Collection at Springfield's Lincoln Library (their public library's local history collection) happens to be a childhood friend of mine named Curtis Mann. I'm going to send him an email to see if he can shed any light on the Fourth Street house.

Best
Rob

[RJNorton]

(04-17-2018 03:08 PM)Rob Wick Wrote:  I wonder if Herndon ever talked about it with his informants. I haven't checked the book yet or the book of letters that came out last year. It seems to me if I'm wrong about the Tinsley heirs that the next logical guess would be to put it to Herndon.

Rob, I have not checked, but my best guess is "no." I would think Burlingame would have used that in his footnote if there were information in that source (unless it's in the material which came out last year).