Where did the Lincolns live after the Globe Tavern?

[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?

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Rob