Making of… the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum

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Instead of first designing the architecture of this building and then the contents, the interior Visitor Experience was designed first by BRC Imagination Arts, under the direction of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency, and then the building was commissioned to house the immersive "experience.”

Scholarship Meets Showmanship 

Scholarly guidance and input came from a team of more than 36 scholars, public school teachers and historical advisors. Employing state-of-the-art technologies, and borrowing technique from Hollywood, Broadway and theme parks, the fully immersive exhibits came to life, making the Visitor Experience not only educational and entertaining, but inspiring as well.

The Log Cabin

The original one-room boyhood long cabin home of Lincoln no longer exists. It was decided that an authentic typical cabin that could have been found on the American frontier in the early 1800s had to be located. Read more

Lincoln Study

The museum designers wanted accurately present Lincoln three dimensionally, not only in his thirties and older but also earlier ages, for the immersive exhibits. Read more

What Were They Wearing?

Each piece of clothing, whether painted in a mural or worn on three-dimensional figures, were meticulously researched, right down to the buttons, belts, and undergarments. Read more

Campaign 1860

How to clearly explain the complex and messy four-way 1860 presidential campaign to a modern audience? The result of this posed question is one of the more daring and imaginative exhibits in the museum. Read more

Whispering Gallery

To physically illustrate Lincoln's unpopularity and communicate the pressures upon the them, a dark, crooked, unsettling hallway was constructed through which the visitors pass. Read more

Emancipation Proclamation - Illusion Corridor

The Emancipation Proclamation was anything but the obvious thing to do at the time. It was extremely controversial. Even the northern states were against it. Read more

 

The Civil War in Four Minutes

To illustrate the scale and tragic scope of the Civil War, the museum’s Civil War in Four Minutes was created. It is a large animated map which plays out the progress of the war, at 1 week per second, with continuously shifting battle lines and flare-ups that mark specific major battles. Read more