Champaign County's Lincoln
My Old Friend Abe Lincoln

When B. F. Harris, who grazed his prize winning cattle on lands owned from Champaign to Mahomet, went to Washington D.C. in 1864, he said, "I went to see my old friend Abe Lincoln."

Lincoln visited frequently with Harris whose home was on the circuit. Lincoln knew Champaign County and its founding residents well. Samuel Busey (of Busey Bank), John Wolfe (of Colonel Wolfe School) and William Coler (of Coler Street in Urbana) corresponded with, practiced law with and befriended Lincoln. Each one personally stepped forward to organize and command volunteer regiments to preserve the Union in the Civil  War. They were all supporters of Lincoln's bid(s) for the presidency despite being strong Democrats.  

True to his image as a man of the people, Lincoln's friends extended beyond the communities' founders: he is known to have helped an old friend, Henry Chew, set up housekeeping in Urbana, by offering to pay his debt. He gave counsel to a distant relative through the trap-door of Urbana's primitive jailhouse.

When Lincoln left Illinois, speaking from the train in Tolono, he said,  "I am leaving you on an errand of national importance, attended as you are aware, with considerable difficulties.  Let  us believe, as some poet has expressed it: "Behind the cloud the sun is shining." I bid you an affectionate farewell."  

When it came time to bid a final farewell to Lincoln, the people of Champaign County were heartbroken. In a letter to his sister, Richard Johnston (a soldier from Middletown, writing from camp) wrote "about the death of the President, it is a horable thing. I never heard anything to equall it...it was the sadest I ever have experienced."

"Since the early settlement of this county he has, from his frequent visits upon professional business, been intimately and well known to very many-His great kindness and urbanity of manner here, as everywhere else, has won for him a warm corner in every heart.  

He was not only our President...he was our fellow citizen." 
The Champaign Gazette

Photo courtesy of the Urbana Free Library, Champaign County Historical Archives
Photo from:  Isabelle Purnell, An Unofficial History of Mahomet,
Illinois courtesy of  Mayhaven Publishing.
Photo courtesy of the Urbana Free Library, Champaign County Historical Archives

This exhibit panel was made possible through a generous gift from the Dodds family, descendants of Benjamin Franklin Harris.