By Harold Henderson
What more could you ask? As Lincoln Memorial Garden president Gretchen Bonfert says, “You don’t have to know anything to enjoy it.”
The Kickapoo yielded the land only after more than a decade of unrelenting guerrilla resistance. Their final defeat–plus John Deere’s invention of a plow that would break up the prairie–allowed downstate Illinois to change from a frontier into a breadbasket for Chicago and the east coast. Commercial farming took over the state, leaving only tiny pockets that looked anything like they had under the Native American regime. Abraham Lincoln settled in Sangamon County in the 1830s and escaped a life of farming drudgery by becoming a lawyer in Springfield and later president.
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In Lincoln’s lifetime, nature was seen as an adversary to be subdued, and as early as the fall of 1859 the history of that subjugation in Illinois was being turned into myth. At the first meeting of the Sangamon County Old Settlers’ Society, according to John Mack Faragher’s extraordinary local history Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie, these original settlers romanticized Pulliam’s arrival 42 years earlier as a solitary venture outside of time and society, in which “the stillness of the unbroken forest was startled by the clangor of an axe.” Of course Pulliam had found the sugar grove by following the Kickapoo trail that crossed the prairie north of Wood River and proceeded up the east bank of Sugar Creek. He then appropriated the Kickapoo grove for his own use. Even in 1817 the environs of the future Lincoln Memorial Garden were neither a howling wilderness nor a still one–something the Old Settlers were already trying to forget. In truth it was a place, Faragher writes, “rich in human experience, rich in human history.”
Jensen saw nature not as an adversary but as an inspiration and a palette for the artist. He and Knudson had their pick of four tracts around the new lake. They chose 61 west-facing acres of the old Newcomer farm because the land was bare. Ravines ran through it, low hedgerows divided its sloping fields, fewer than a dozen trees grew in them and only one or two of any size. “Here,” said Jensen approvingly, “we can paint our own pictures.” He scraped the old canvas clean–all but one of the existing trees were cut down, the hedgerows were rooted out, the ground was fertilized, and 1,000 feet of drainage tile were laid underground to speed the runoff of water from swampy pockets.
Garden clubs from around the state vied to plant individual patches of the garden–the Oak Park and River Forest Garden Club had the southern “Witch Hazel Trail”; the Wheaton Garden Club had a stand of oak, hickory, and maple; the Winnetka Weeders the south bank of the lily pond. At the garden’s 1938 dedication, Jensen took his turn splitting white oak rails for the fence. The rails came from trees grown near Old Sangamon Town, where Lincoln had once built an oak flatboat.
It soon became obvious–indeed it was part of Knudson’s plan–that the naturalists could educate better in a workplace that consisted of more than one covered shelter and a primitive comfort station. In 1965 the foundation opened a 4,400-square-foot nature center in the garden, low slung and faced with rough brick and stone from the Smoky Mountains. It still houses garden offices, space for environmental education, and the craft shop that had been run out of Knudson’s car trunk.
