Abraham Lincoln and Coles County, Illinois

In the predawn darkness of Friday, February 1, 1861, aboard a westbound train, Abraham Lincoln, left Coles County for the last time. Elected to the presidency the previous November and not yet having departed his home in Springfield for Washington, D.C., to be inaugurated, he had come on January 30 to visit his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln, and to say farewell to friends and family in Charleston and the surrounding area. He would never return. Having led the United States through the Civil War