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Springfield June 2015
Frank Lloyd Wright's Dana-Thomas House     Old Capitol     State Capitol     Lincoln's Tomb
The Dana-Thomas Home of Susan Lawrence Dana (later used by the Thomas Publishing Company, which sold it to the state).
     
 
A meeting room with one of a pair of lamps Wright designed, and a sitting area
    the reception hall (post cards; no pictures allowed inside the house)
When she could no longer afford to keep up the big house, Mrs. Dana moved to the cottage that accompanied the mansion
that Wright tore down to build her home--very much on the other side of the tracks. The Illinois State Capitol is to the right.
 
The Vachel Linsay House (more on VL below)
 
Downtown and the Old Capitol (to the left, behind George, below)
 
         
   
Refined, simple, an early-nineteenth-century feeling to it. Lincoln lay in state here.
The State Capitol Building
Something else entirely, the tallest state capitol in the US, taller even (including the flagpole) that the Capitol in Washington.
       
   
   Interiors are grand beyond imagining.
 
The House of Representatives, left, and the Senate. The famous "present" button for ambitious politicians seeking to hide
their true colors--er, principles, is concealed under the roll-top desks. The cradel of presidents.
The Lincoln Tomb and Monument / Oak Ridge

At Oak Ridge, where Lincoln is buried. Incredibly, the entire monument had to be taken down 30 years after it was completed and reconstructed. The first picture is the Receiving Vault where the President's body lay May through December 1865 (his son Willy with him). Funeral services for Lincoln were held here May 4, 1865. From the end of 1865 to 1871 the bodies (and a second son, Eddie) were in a temporary tomb. Tad, a third son, was the first to interred in the Monument 1871, followed by his father and two brothers.

   
     
The statues inside the tomb are reduced versions of famous works found elsewhere.
The four bronze sculptures on the corners are the 4 branches of the military from the Civil War (infantry, cavalry, artillery, navy).
       
Also buried at Oak Ridge are Susan Lawrence Dana and Vachel Lindsay.
 

Who was Vachel Lindsay? Here is a great page on the poet, courtesy of The Poetry Foundation, the source of these two paragraphs:

His career

Marshall Field's (department store), Chicago, IL, worked in toy department, 1900-03; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, museum guide, 1904-05, art history lecturer, winters, 1906-08; Nicholls Gas Tubing Works, New York City, laborer, 1905; Young Men's Christian Association (Y.M.C.A.), Springfield, IL, lecturer, winters, 1905-08; Anti-Saloon League, lecturer in central Illinois, 1908-09; founder of proposed center of democratic art in Springfield, 1909-12; lectured and recited poems at universities, schools, and clubs in United States, 1910-22; lectured on motion pictures at Columbia University and the University of Chicago, beginning 1914; first American poet invited to lecture at Oxford, England, 1920; lectured in England in Cambridge and Westminster Central Hall; Gulfport Junior College, Gulfport, MS, poet in residence, 1923-24; journalist in Spokane, WA, 1924-29.
Commentary "Until he is rehabilitated by another generation of poets and poetry enthusiasts, Vachel Lindsay will remain known for the two most notable aspects of his creative work: his commitment to poetry as a performance art at a time when poetry was becoming more and more an artifact of the printed page; and his celebration of the village in a century when most of American culture turned more and more toward the teeming urban centers." [I would note that there are multiple versions of most of his works in print. Lindsay must have his readers, as a search of editions on Alibris.com shows! --AJF 6/25/15
Here's what he wrote after hiking around, living a beggar's life, in 1906: "I will never forget the easy, dreaming Kentucky and the droning bees in the blue grass, and the walks with Cousin Eudora and Aunt Eudora, and the queer feeling of being the family disgrace somewhat straightened out when I stood up to read 'The Tree of Laughing Bells' to the school," Lindsay concluded. "As far as I know, I read it in my beggar's raiment. I am sure I felt that way, and it was the kind hearts around me in that particular spot that made me want to live."