Museum Core Exhibits
The Journeys and Treasures Gallery
Explore the permanent exhibit areas, the Journeys and Treasures Gallery, during an evening event at the Museum. Please speak with Facilities Rental Office staff to include the Journeys and Treasures Gallery in your Museum event reservation.
Journeys and Treasures Gallery: $250
The Pre-Presidential Years (Journey One)
Your journey begins at the full-scale reproduction of Lincoln’s boyhood Indiana log cabin home. As you enter the exhibit, discover a teenaged Lincoln reading borrowed books by firelight. Continue on by viewing his life in Springfield, Illinois including his courtship with Mary Todd, his home life, his legal and political careers, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
Finally, end this first journey with the presidential campaign of 1860 by watching multiple video monitors showing a TV news program analyzing the campaign in which Lincoln won the presidency. This daring and different approach makes the complex four-way presidential race of 1860 understandable to today’s audience by accurately, and amusingly, translating the issues and strategies.
As you exit this journey, observe then President-Elect Lincoln making his famous and emotional farewell speech before leaving Springfield for Washington, D.C. where he will begin his first term as president. He will not return alive.
The Presidential Years (Journey Two)
Across the Plaza, enter a full-scale reproduction of The White House into the Blue Room where you will find Mary Todd Lincoln being fitted for a gown by Elizabeth Keckley, her dressmaker. Continue your journey through Lincoln’s life as he dealt with the personal tragedy of the death of his son Willie and the effect on his wife Mary, the human tragedy and sacrifice of the Civil War, the emancipation controversy, the Gettysburg dedication ceremony, and the conclusion of the Civil War.
End this journey with the night of April 14, 1865, and its aftermath. Pass through a recreation of Ford’s Theater, where John Wilkes Booth shot Abraham Lincoln, on your way to a nearly full-scale recreation of Representatives Hall in Springfield’s Old State Capitol where you can experience what people who paid their respects back in 1865 may have felt as they filed past the closed casket of Abraham Lincoln.
The Treasures Gallery
Presented by The Louise and Barry Taper Family Foundation
This gallery allows visitors to view dozens of items that were part of the Lincolns’ lives. Artifacts from the ALPLM’s Lincoln Collection are rotated into the gallery and are part of an in-depth display that helps put you in touch with the personal lives of the Lincolns and the time in which they lived. In the center of the gallery is a large cylindrical wall – the inner sanctum – which houses some of the greatest Lincoln artifacts.