Monument Maker: Daniel Chester French and the Lincoln Memorial
From the time he was a little boy Dan liked to make things beautiful He lived on a farm in New Hampshire until he was ten in a house built by his father When Dan wasn’t helping with the farm he was off exploring in the fields
He decorated notebooks with names and drawings of the birds he saw golden plovers in the marshes bluejays and woodcocks in the woods goldenwings and quails in the fields
In 1860 Dan’s father opened a law office in Boston Massachusetts The family moved to the busy town of Cambridge renting a modern house with gas heating and an indoor bathroom The poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lived down the street Talk at the dinner table was always lively Sometimes the conversations were about the gate that needed fixing or the birds Dan saw that day Sometimes the conversations were about more troubling things like the growing divide between the Northern and Southern states
Abraham Lincoln was elected America’s sixteenth president in the fall of 1860 The country was breaking in two over the issue of slavery Before the end of the year South Carolina became the first Southern state to split off from the Union In a speech on his first day in office Lincoln said to the people of the South We are not enemies but friends His calls for unity did not work Ten more Southern states joined South Carolina to form the Confederate States of America and on April 20 1861 Robert E Lee took command of the Confederate troops to lead them against the Union Army The Civil War was beginning It was Dan’s eleventh birthday As the war dragged on the family talked more and more often of friends and neighbors who were wounded or had died
