The Springfield, Illinois Lincoln Museum has high-hopes on snagging the Fort Wayne Lincoln Museum collection, as reported by The South Town Star, Chicago.
Lincoln Presidential Museum a contender for Fort Wayne collection
July 20, 2008 – SPRINGFIELD – The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield–is a finalist for a $20 million collection of Abraham Lincoln materials being given away by the Lincoln Financial Foundation, owner of–a Lincoln museum in Fort Wayne, Ind., that recently closed.
“It would be a very, very nice complement to our collection,” said Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum director Rick Beard. “It’s a rich collection.”
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“The photograph collection is really rich,” Beard said. “It particularly fills a hole in our collection. Photography is not an area of our strength.”
Receiving the collection also would reunite some artifacts. For example, Fort Wayne has Lincoln family photographs that were taken from the album the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum possesses.
To make the museum’s offer to receive the collection more alluring, it created a nationwide consortium of partners that would all share in loaning, interpreting and digitizing the collection. Partners include the Chicago History Museum, Lincoln Home National Historic Site, Lincoln College in Lincoln and the University of Illinois and its National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Other organizations affiliated with the consortium include Chicago’s McCormick Freedom Museum and two Philadelphia museums, the National Constitution Center and the Civil War and Underground Railroad Museum.
“I think we’re in a very good position,” Beard said. “They could back up the truck tomorrow, and we could begin cataloging it the next day. Not even the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian can do that. We’re Lincoln 24 hours, seven days a week.”
The ability to merge the two collections into one comprehensive group places them in a far better position to end up with the Fort Wayne collection than most others, including the local Fort Wayne effort.
The Springfield Lincoln Presidential Library also recently obtained more that 1,500 Lincoln artifacts from largest private Lincoln collections in the world, the Louise Taper collection, which includes Lincoln’s top hat.
One would assume that Lincoln aficionados and scholars would better appreciate the collections being located in one location. I’d wager that Springfield will end up the winner.
AWB
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The Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, IL is phenomenal. It opened about three years ago and you really need to plan on staying for an entire day there, despite all of the other attractions in the city as well, such as Lincoln’s former legal office and tomb. This would be a great place for the collections from Fort Wayne to be placed.