The story of Abraham Lincoln has been told countless times in books, movies, at museums and living history exhibits.

Abraham Lincoln.

He freed the slaves.

He saved the union.

Honest Abe, who had one year of formal education and went on to become the 16th president of the United States, is considered one of the greatest presidents this country has ever had.

And now Lincoln's life, legacy and legend come alive when a new $6 million state of the art facility located in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The new Lincoln Museum houses 11 private galleries of exhibits four theaters.

18 interactive exhibits, including computerized touch screen displays and many hands on activities for children and adults.

3000 square feet of temporary and changing exhibit space.

5400 square feet of collection, storage space and a large museum store.

In 1992, Lincoln National Corporation decided its unique collection of Lincoln related materials should be shared with a larger audience.

Several ideas were considered, including moving the museum to a larger metropolitan area for greater visibility.

Early on, we discussed with the leadership the value that that has had.

We helped do some research and and met with our selection committee, the review committee that they established their advisory committee to decide what to do with the collection.

We were trying to give them statistics on the current travel patterns we have in our community the state of tourism offices also very helpful to try to coordinate information, to understand with what needed to be done if they're going to invest into a new museum in marketing it.

So I think we tried early on to provide them with information, but it was their decision and we're very pleased with that decision.

We have the opportunity to come on and talk to members of the board about the disposition of the library and artifacts and how it might best be used.

And it was it was a great opportunity to see this outstanding collection, extremely valuable collection in place.

They were solicited by Indianapolis, and Chicago and Springfield, Illinois, and Washington, D.C., even to try to relocate that collection or even, you know, build their new idea for a museum someplace else.

Probably about 20 years ago, the museum was moved to the Harrison, to the Clinton Street building, which was constructed at that time.

And I remember thinking in that time, this has got to be the best museum ever created.

And the displays which were down on the lower level, depicting the the progression of Lincoln's life, I thought were just terrific.

But even with that, it never seemed to me that we got the recognition from the museum and the collection that it deserved.

And so I think you all know we went through an analysis about whether we should keep the museum at Fort Wayne.

Was there ways to make it more available to the public in this country?

Should we move it to Springfield, Illinois?

Should we couple up with with some of the institutions in Washington, D.C. to try to make it such a treasure in a collection that could be more available to the public?

And the really neat thing for me was that we we really didn't take a hard look at that.

And the decision was made to keep the museum here in Fort Wayne.

An opportunity, in my opinion, as a museum professional, would have been lost in doing a popular presentation of Lincoln that could grow, that could be very good, but could grow and expand the scholarly base, and the scholarly use could still be maintained.

And so there could be both done in the case of a museum and library.

But the option might be lost with a collection of this enormous power if it were not presented popularly.

And it just seemed like such an opportunity, whether in Fort Wayne or wherever.

I think Fort Wayne is extremely fortunate to have this corporation do this and to have this collection, and it's going to be known for it to help attain the lofty goal of a world class museum.

Lincoln National Corporation hired a small team of solid professionals whose backgrounds complemented each other.

I think it's a great team because it does dovetail very well.

My background is most strongly in administration, and so I wear that hat.

I look at the exhibit, things like that for maintenance purposes.

You know, that's a great hands on exhibit.

Are we going to be able to maintain it?

We need lockable drawers if we don't have a volunteer to station that area, things like that.

Carolyn would look at the lighting, for example, and say, you know, this is a photo opportunity area included within the permanent exhibit.

However, all those photos are going to take flash unless we light it appropriately, and then we'll have to make sure that no original documents are under that particularly strong lighting because it will fade them out.

And Jerry's role would be to make sure that what is said in that area and what is exhibited in that area conveys the element of history that we're talking about there.

It just is gone.

So I've gone so quickly and we're gee, we ever going to be done with this exhibit?

Are we ever going to get it now?

Perfect enough.

And but we're building the exhibit in such a way that as we add great new artifacts, we'll be able to to change the permanent exhibit.

If we find something really wonderful that will say that better or show that part of Lincoln or Lincoln's role in the Civil War better, we'll be able to just change the exhibit.

So we're trying to make it flexible so that we'll be able to do that as we find as it would.

I think it would be really difficult not to be able to put something wonderful that you found for the collection into the exhibit.

So that was one of the things we were working with the designers about that we want some flexibility here.

Exhibit design, something I was not experienced in.

Again, I enjoyed museums over a lifetime.

I know what I like as as well.

So it's about art.

But I had no idea how to put together an exhibit for that purpose.

We hired an exhibit design firm which knows exhibits but doesn't necessarily know anything about Abraham Lincoln.

So from the start, we had this very interesting process of working together where we are trying to teach what we know about Lincoln, tell, communicate to the exhibit designers what we want to convey about Abraham Lincoln, what messages we want to emphasize out of the vast number of things you could present in a museum.

And they in turn are able to tell us what is technologically feasible, what is effective in terms of presentation and so on.

So right from the start, we just brainstormed.

Why do we why do people care about Abraham Lincoln?

What's the big deal?

Why is there no Millard Fillmore Museum with 100,000 visitors annually in every second grade class that I talk to, the children know who Abraham Lincoln is.

They know he wore a hat, he had a beard.

You know, he's on the penny, perhaps.

So here's a famous perhaps the most famous person in American history.

So let's start with that.

Why is he famous?

Why do people still know about him?

Why do they care?

Yes, we went through their collections and reviewed them.

They were so vast that it was obvious that we just couldn't deal with it from an inventory state.

But what we created was a series of seven galleries that would be true to a storyline and it's very difficult to jump around with Mr. Lincoln's life.

You need to take him from a young man.

You need to move into his political career, then his presidential career, and then we could look at some of the other eclectic things about him.

But once we set the galleries and the main themes and how they were going to look, they became depositories for the client.

Then to pull out different exhibit pieces that would decimate what they had because they had things for every group.

They had things from his youth, they had things from his political earlier years.

Now this was just a matter of now.

Now they had homes.

They had kind of stage sets in which to put these in.

Soon after the final design was determined, construction began.

Welcome to the Lincoln Museum.

Under construction.

We call this history under construction.

Over 13 months later, with fewer construction delays, it was time to begin moving the collection over from its old home to the new state of the art facility.

A moving collection of this magnitude would give any archivist reason to worry, but it was carefully planned down to the last picture, keeping strict attention to the special care handling and security of the artifacts.

Lots of things are completely done and I can point to huge piles of things that are finished now, like all the exhibit graphics are done, all of the artifacts are now located, are going to be here in about 10 minutes.

So that that part of it I feel really good about.

And then there's just, you know, it's really fun actually working with putting it together and seeing how it goes together upstairs.

And that being mostly, I would say the biggest thing we learned was that the exhibit works exactly the way we had hoped it would work.

I mean, that was exciting.

As you go through those doors, you see one of the first high points, which is the theater presentation.

That's an orientation for visitors and it's called the American Experiment Theater Presentation explains to people what the American experiment is, why Lincoln used the term experiment when he referred to the concept of self-government and what he meant by why was it an experiment?

Then you enter the next area, which is Lincoln's America.

It's the first gallery, and it tells you the story of the United States from about 1820 to 1850, 60, that era.

And as much as possible, when we look at all three regions of the country, it tells you the story from Lincoln's words and with Lincoln's experiences within those regions, for example, the West where he was born, you see log cabin life, the industrial north.

You see as a little later because he didn't visit the north until the late 1850s and then again in 1860.

And then lastly, you see the South, which he visited for the first time at the age of 18 on a raft going down the Ohio and the Mississippi.

And you actually step on his raft and you go down figuratively the Ohio and the Mississippi, and you see the South as he experienced the South and learn about slavery, as he did.

So I think that's an interesting gallery.

It is a setting and it gives you the feeling for the era.

Then the next gallery from prairie politician to president recites the chronology of Abraham Lincoln's life from his youth until his election to the presidency in 1860.

And from there you see his rise in political experience as he becomes member of the Illinois legislature and then eventually a member of Congress.

His choice not to continue in politics in the early 1850s and then after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, his choice to return to politics, because he saw a very definite need to be active and countermand the spread of slavery.

His election to the presidency in 1860, and his leaving Springfield.

His beautiful speech that is almost like a benediction where he says that he has before him a greater task than that of Washington, because by the time he is elected, seven Southern states have succeeded.

By the time he is inaugurated, 11 Southern states have succeeded.

So crisis is at hand.

And you learn that as you enter the next gallery, the American Civil War, which tells you about just that, the Civil War.

And it tells you in two levels.

That's a place where we really work on audience appeal.

There is a detailed timeline which tells the story of the Civil War for buffs and then on the walls for people who are not as detailed interested in the Civil War, there are the major significant events up on the walls and that hits the highlights of the war.

There are loads of interactives in that gallery, including the computer games.

There is also the public opinion Bath, which was a term that Lincoln used that referred to as open office hours that he kept where you or I, if we live back then could simply get in line as long as we got up early enough in the morning and we could see the president and we could talk to him about anything we wanted to.

And this is an interactive where people come at you and you sit down and suddenly you realize, Oh, I'm Abraham Lincoln, I'm supposed to decide what to do.

And then you push a button and you can see what Lincoln decided to do.

So that's a fun one.

The next major gallery is called The Fiery Trial, and that is another theater.

That's our third theater.

It has within it three major productions, all of which are on the Civil War.

They are Lincoln and Emancipation.

And remember, the Emancipation Proclamation was a war effort, a war major, then Lincoln, commander in chief.

And lastly, Lincoln's soldiers.

And each of these productions runs 7 minutes and they all touch an aspect of the Civil War.

The Lincoln Soldier is is my favorite because it tells the story of George Squire, a Fort Wayne boy who enters the war, stays throughout the duration of the war.

And I'll let you find out for yourselves whether he survives the war or not.

So you have to come to the museum and see that they were young.

His stories are told in the words of his letters home to his wife, Ellen, and they're wonderful.

Sometimes in the collection.

It is a scrap of paper saying I survived the battle.

Basically saying that.

And sometimes it's a humorous account of camp life, including his laundry schedule where he decides to wash his underwear only once a month, that kind of thing.

When you exit the theater, you enter a gallery, which is Lincoln and beyond, and includes the assassination and talks about Lincoln's legacy after he dies.

His life ends and basically his legacy begins.

He achieves, to some degree, deification.

And so that is a very interesting case.

There you look in another part of his legacy when you enter the next gallery, and that is his family.

And you learn what became of the Lincoln family.

And that's really pretty much the end of the story from the historical point of view.

Then we enter the 20th century and we look at how we remember Lincoln.

You can try on his size 12 boots, try and period costumes from the era.

You can see a fourth production in our fourth theater on Lincoln at the movies with Gene Siskel and Dr. David Herbert.

Donald, you can look at a fiber optic map indicating how we remember Lincoln in the use of his name geographically and in advertising, some of which are really fun.

Be sure you look for the Abe's bail bond, where Abe is his name and freedom is his game.

Some interesting uses of Lincoln and of course, the last and most prominent way we remember Lincoln today is the Lincoln Memorial, which is the end of that gallery, which includes an account of imagery of the major uses of the memorial to this date, the Marian Anderson concert, Martin Luther King's speech, the I Have a Dream speech, the dedication at the memorial, a Vietnam War protest at the memorial.

And in front of that is the final computer game, the American experiment, which traces the status of the American experiment today with running tallies, according to the way visitors answer the question.

And it lets us know what people think about our American experiment today.

Then the final gallery.

Gallery 11 is the art gallery, which includes our finest artwork, and it really looks fantastic.

Most of it has returned from the conservators and is in the finest condition it's been in for years and we're very excited about that.

As you tour the exhibits, you immediately realize that this museum is unlike any other you've ever experienced, which is exactly what the designer planned.

I've always had the feeling that exhibitions in the old sense where you'd go through a museum and they were positioned in a case and in nice clean rows with little labels next to them, and they were all individually and orderly, not touching each other.

This was the old feeling of exhibits, and we really had a problem with that because we don't feel that people learn that clearly from such an out of context position.

So what we decide to do is very much like a play or an opera.

You can have a very complex story like the life of Mr. Lincoln or could be a natural history story.

But what you need to do is put a simple backdrop around it that allows you to know what point in time you're talking about.

If we're talking about is youth.

And the first time he was exposed to slavery, we know that was on the riverboat trip down to New Orleans.

Thus that first stage set of Mr. Lincoln up on the river boat steering was our first introduction to him as a young man.

And they put all of the objects and they're taking a look at the north, south in the west in context.

At that point.

Then when he gets into his young political career, we felt that the political sport of the day people would come out just like for a baseball game or from some sport, we would have to do with political sports.

This was a big deal and people would come from miles around and spend 3 hours, 4 hours listening to debates.

So we created that type of an aura in the space where the crowd above is bantering and interchanging with them youre always, walking into a room that's alive, and a real sense of, Oh, well, this must be some type of a political debate.

And so as we move through the space, the room that we're in is a parlor that's very similar to what might have been in Mr. Lincoln's home and a remembrance of a lot of the memorabilia.

And then as we went back in here, we had so many fun opportunities to get it, get Mr. Lincoln contemporary, and to use Mr. Lincoln like the politicians do, like the movies do, and like different advertisements take advantage of and just show how timeless his thoughts are.

And obviously some of his statements, the emphasis of this museum on what I can only call Lincoln in popular culture, that is how Lincoln at the time was perceived, how Lincoln subsequently has been perceived and received.

This is something no other museum does, so that if you want to see, for example, not photographs particularly, but drawings woodcuts cartoons of Lincoln, this is the place to go.

In my new book, for instance, I draw quite heavily on this collection for the week preceding the grand opening was a busy one.

There were some final touches being made to a few exhibits, lots of preview tours and of course, parties.

To the Lincoln Museum and to all of you friends for joining us tonight.

the highlight was the inaugural opening celebration featuring former President Gerald Ford as the keynote speaker celebrating as we dedicate this tribute to the life and legacy of Abraham Lincoln, we should stop for a moment here.

And this was ten to ponder the treasures within the walls of this fine museum, the pain and sadness of America's greatest internal struggle are those for us to see and to never forget the life of a great American is there for us to admire and to learn from the ability of a great nation to rise above its darkest, deepest divisions.

Is there a beacon of hope for our children and our grandchildren within the walls of this museum are the seeds of an inspiration.

On whom will they fall?

A person, a man or woman, in my judgment, will come forward under our system of democratic capitalism and do the job for the American people, as Abraham Lincoln did more than a century ago.

I, for one, have great faith that this will happen in America.

Thank you very much.

I don't think any of us had a vision, this facility, and any understanding of what it could finally be like when it was all completed.

The collection is a very deep and rich collection of Lincoln's irreplaceable artifacts and documents, and that does carry a lot of responsibility with it.

As we design the exhibit, we thought about that, that this was something we could not simply put in a case and say there were done or our job is done, that we had to both care for it properly and present it to the public in a way that would enhance it, make its meaning more available, or give the public more opportunity to find meaning in it rather than simply putting out without any context.

And we feel that responsibility every day.

Or I think this is a marvelous place, this is a wonderful place.

And my only regret is that I don't have days and days to see all of it because you cannot see it all on just walking through it once.

It's a place that you will have to come back to again and again, and there are always buttons to push.

I wish I could stay and push the ball.

I'm very proud of it.

We worked.

We, meaning the museum staff, gave two years of our lives to this and I think it shows that we were dedicated, that we were driven to the best that we could do and that we were driven to be the best we could be in the field, in the museum field.

And I think we achieved all three goals.

When people tell us comments like This museum belongs in New York or Chicago, we feel like, yes, we did it.