Saturday, December 05, 2020

First Paragraph

Abraham Lincoln, with his son Tad in tow, walked around Richmond, Virginia, one day in April 1865, and if you try to retrace their steps today you won't see much that they saw, which shouldn't be a surprise, of course. The street grid is the same, though, and if you're in the right mood and know what to look for, the lineaments of the earlier city begin to surface, like the outline of a scuttled old scow rising through the shallows of a pond. Among the tangle of freeway interchanges and office buildings you'll come across an overgrown park or a line of redbrick town houses, an unlikely old bell tower or a few churches scattered from block to block, dating to decades before the Civil War and still giving off vibrations from long ago.

- From Land of Lincoln: Adventures in Abe's America by Andrew Ferguson

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