Springfield to Quincy to St. Louis: a millennium of who came through here
KSPI Abraham Lincoln Capital is the Lincoln-est airport in the country: Springfield is where Lincoln practiced law from 1837, lived in the only home he ever owned, and came home to Oak Ridge Cemetery in 1865. The home, the tomb, and the presidential library all sit within five miles of each other. Northwest to KUIN Quincy, site of the sixth Lincoln-Douglas debate on October 13, 1858, and the town that took in some 5,000 Mormon refugees across the frozen Mississippi in the winter of 1838-39, when Quincy itself held about 1,500 people; the refugees moved forty miles upriver the next year to build Nauvoo. South to KCPS St. Louis Downtown, on the Illinois bank opposite the 630-foot Gateway Arch, the tallest arch in the world. Ten miles northeast sits Cahokia Mounds, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1982: at its peak around 1100 CE the largest pre-Columbian city north of Mexico, larger than the London of its day, with Monks Mound still rising a hundred feet, the biggest earthen mound in North America. A millennium of who came through here, in one afternoon of flying.