Quincy, IL
Quincy Regional Airport-Baldwin Field sits eight miles east of the Mississippi River with a single 7,098-foot 4/22 runway and a Class D tower. Quincy was the second-largest city in Illinois in 1870 and one of the most important river ports between St. Louis and Davenport. In the winter of 1838-39, after Missouri Governor Lilburn Boggs issued the "Extermination Order" expelling Mormons from Missouri, more than 5,000 refugees crossed the frozen Mississippi into Quincy. The town's population was 1,500. Quincy fed and housed them through that winter; the Mormons later moved upriver to Nauvoo, twenty miles north, and built a city of 12,000 by 1844 — for several years the largest city in Illinois. After Joseph Smith was killed at Carthage Jail in June 1844, the Mormons left Nauvoo and crossed Iowa toward Utah. Their Quincy hosts have been remembered ever since; in 2002, Brigham Young University gave the city a formal "thank you" plaque on the public square. Quincy is also where, on October 13, 1858, Lincoln and Douglas held their sixth great debate.
Samuel Clemens grew up in Hannibal between ages 7 and 18, and the sleepy Mississippi River town of the 1840s became the model for St. Petersburg in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn — white picket fence and all. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum preserves the actual two-story house and a complex of buildings with first editions and personal effects. Just south of town, the Mark Twain Cave (where Tom and Becky got lost, and where Jesse James supposedly hid) is the oldest show cave in Missouri. The river itself is the real monument: Twain piloted steamboats on this water and took his pen name from the leadsman's cry "mark twain" — two fathoms, safe water.
Abraham Lincoln arrived in Springfield in 1837 as a 28-year-old lawyer. He married Mary Todd here in 1842, raised four sons here, practiced law and rode the Eighth Judicial Circuit for nearly 25 years, gave the "house divided" speech here in 1858, and left for Washington as president-elect in 1861. After his assassination on April 15, 1865, the funeral train carried him back through eleven cities to Springfield. He has been here ever since. Lincoln's Tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery is a 117-foot granite obelisk designed by sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead, built with public donations between 1868 and 1874. Lincoln is buried in a crypt under the obelisk along with Mary Todd and three of their four sons — Edward, William, and Thomas ("Tad"). Robert, the only one who survived to adulthood, served as Secretary of War under Garfield and is buried at Arlington. At the entrance to the tomb a bronze bust of Lincoln has a polished gleaming nose — generations of visitors have rubbed it for luck. Oak Ridge is the second most-visited cemetery in the United States, after Arlington. The Old State Capitol (1837-1840, served as the State House until 1876) is downtown — a low Greek Revival building of locally quarried Sugar Creek limestone. Lincoln gave the "A house divided against itself cannot stand" speech here on June 16, 1858, accepting the Republican nomination for the US Senate. He also lay in state here after his assassination. The current Illinois State Capitol (1888) sits two blocks SW — its dome rises 405 feet, 74 feet taller than the US Capitol in Washington, intentionally so. The Lincoln Home (Eighth and Jackson, ~6 blocks SE of the Old State Capitol) is the only home Lincoln ever owned. The Lincolns lived there from 1844 until 1861. It is now a National Park Service unit — Lincoln Home National Historic Site — and the surrounding four-block neighborhood has been restored to its 1860 appearance.
A small white Carpenter Gothic farmhouse with a single distinctive Gothic Revival window — built in 1881 by Charles Dibble in Eldon, Iowa. In August 1930, Grant Wood, then a 39-year-old painter living in Cedar Rapids, was driving through Eldon and spotted the house. He decided the building "looked the kind of place where the sort of people I am going to paint would live." He returned home, used his sister Nan and the family dentist Byron McKeeby as models for the two figures, and painted "American Gothic" — the most parodied painting in American art. It debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago later in 1930 and won a $300 prize. The house is in Eldon (population ~900), a small town in southeast Iowa, 14 miles southeast of Ottumwa. It is owned by the State Historical Society of Iowa as the American Gothic House Center, with an exhibit center next door and costumes available for visitors to pose in the iconic style — pitchfork, apron, and round-collared coat. The painting itself remains at the Art Institute of Chicago.
The Katy Trail is the longest developed rails-to-trails route in America — about 240 miles of crushed-limestone path following the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas (the "MKT," or "Katy") railroad bed clear across the state. For much of its length it runs right along the north bank of the Missouri River, under the same towering bluffs Lewis and Clark passed in 1804, threading river towns like Rocheport, Hermann, and Augusta and the state's growing wine country. It's a flat, car-free corridor through the Missouri River Valley — cyclists ride the whole thing over several days.