Abraham Lincoln Depot

The Great Western Railroad built this Springfield depot in 1852, and it earned its place in American memory on a gloomy morning in 1861, when citizens assembled to see Abraham Lincoln off to Washington; using the office as a reception room to greet friends one last time, the president-elect mounted the rear platform of his train and delivered the brief, emotional Farewell Address. The Great Western later merged into the Toledo, Wabash, and Western — eventually the Wabash Railroad — which shifted passenger operations elsewhere and used the old building as a freight house, adding a second story in 1900. After the Wabash consolidated operations in Decatur, the building cycled through businesses and warehouse use until a local group bought it in the 1960s and ran it as a museum from 1965 to 1976, surviving a suspected-arson fire in December 1968 that spared portions dating to Lincoln's day. Sangamon State University operated the restored depot from 1977 to 1980 under a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, and Copley Press later managed it. Attorney Jon Gray Noll purchased the building in 2012 and renovated it extensively; the first floor reopened as a tourist site run jointly with the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, and the depot joined the National Register of Historic Places on August 25, 2014.