Published: July 02, 2008 12:01 pm         

Museum’s closing should give us pause

As we head into the one weekend of the year when Americans should be the proudest, a news item from Fort Wayne is one that should give us all pause for some serious thought.

In case you missed it, Monday was the last day the Lincoln Museum in downtown Fort Wayne was open. The museum, which reportedly has a $20 million collection of Lincoln artifacts including a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, closed. Attendance at the museum had been declining, even though the museum has been around for 77 years.

Some may think Fort Wayne is a curious place to have a Lincoln museum, but its relationship can be traced to the Lincoln Financial Foundation there. Still, you might think that this museum would be more popular in the second largest city in Indiana, a state where Lincoln spent his boyhood.

If there is a positive side to this story, it is that there are groups interested in acquiring the collection, including the Indiana Historical Society, the Indiana State Museum, Ford’s Theater, the Indiana Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and at least one other Washington-based entity. It’s good to know the collection will not be auctioned off to the highest bidder, and sometime in January, it will have a new home.

The troubling side of this story is that at a time when we should be celebrating the virtues and values of one of our greatest presidents — some would argue our greatest — his popularity is declining in one of the states where he lived.

There are many great ironies in this situation, not the least of which is the timing of Sen. Barack Obama’s run for the presidency. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation which historians will say did not technically free a single slave, but it set the tone for constitutional changes that reverberated through this country. It’s hard today to believe that this nation would go to war against itself primarily because of racial divides, but it happened. The fact that Lincoln led us through such a time of upheaval is a point in history that should never be forgotten.

Had the South won the Civil War or succeeded in becoming a separate country, the world would be a very different place today. The fact that Obama is an African-American and, like Lincoln, a senator from Illinois, is a true irony, especially when you consider that Lincoln was a Republican and Obama is a Democrat. Despite party and regional differences, we have come to value certain equalities that Lincoln knew we had to have.

The second thing I find unusual about this situation is that regardless of how hard our own Indiana entities try, the failure of the Lincoln Museum to stay open suggests that we as Hoosiers don’t value the contributions of a man who may have been the most famous person ever to live in the state. We’ve honored him in other ways in Indiana, most notably in southern Indiana where he grew up. Many communities such as Logansport have a school named for him. Drive through Indiana and you’ll find the Lincoln Trail where he traveled as a young railsplitter.

But last Sunday when I was driving through Lincoln, Ind., where my father was raised, I thought how unusual it is that Indiana could lose something so special that pays tribute to one of its favorite sons. Lincoln, Ind., doesn’t seem the same since its tallest structure, a grain elevator, was leveled. It was almost a symbol for the community, as much as the old school that once stood there. Without that symbol, the town is a little emptier. Without the museum in Fort Wayne, or even in Indiana, we as Hoosiers are a little emptier, too.

In my gut, I have to say as a native born Hoosier I would hate to see the museum moved to another state, even to Washington where the Lincoln Memorial would dwarf its significance, and it would be lost in the shuffle of other attractions such as the Smithsonian.

As an American, I hope in my heart that we are not forgetting what Lincoln meant to this country and that we realize his contributions have forever shaped it. There are reasons why his face is on the penny, the coin we see every day of our lives. He gained the respect of generations of Americans not only for leading us through one of our worst times, but because his life was sacrificed for his actions. What he saw ahead for us is not something he lived to enjoy.

The face on those copper coins says much about what we value in this country, and we shouldn’t devalue the contributions of a man who was one of the greatest leaders the world has known.

For anyone looking for a place to put a museum, I know the small towns of Indiana are places where it should be. There are places like Medaryville and Francesville in Pulaski County where the Lincoln funeral train paused for a few moments for local residents to pay homage. And there are towns like Lincoln, Ind., that would be elevated by its presence.

Dave Kitchell is a columnist for the Pharos-Tribune. He can be reached through the newspaper at ptnews@pharostribune.com