Qualla: Lincoln Memorial

Lincoln Memorial: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Anthony Quintano from Mount Laurel, United States, CC BY 2.0. Daniel Chester French had originally planned the seated figure of Abraham Lincoln to stand 10 feet tall. By the time the marble was being shaped, French had increased the dimensions until the figure measured 19 feet from head to foot. If Lincoln were depicted standing, he would be 28 feet tall. The reason was acoustical and architectural and emotional all at once - inside Henry Bacon's vast Greek temple, where the interior chamber alone stretches 60 feet wide, 74 feet deep, and 60 feet high, anything smaller would have been swallowed. The Piccirilli brothers, six immigrant Italian carvers based in the Bronx, did the marble work. They cut Lincoln from 28 blocks of Georgia white marble assembled so precisely the seams are barely visible. The figure looks down at visitors with the heavy patience of a man whose face had been etched by a war and a re-election and a Thursday night at Ford's Theatre.

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Image: Anthony Quintano from Mount Laurel, United States | CC BY 2.0

Lincoln Memorial: Six Bills and a Speaker's Veto

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jeff Kubina, CC BY-SA 2.0. Plans for a Lincoln memorial began before the dirt over the assassinated president had settled. Lot Flannery's statue went up in front of the D.C. City Hall in 1868. Congress passed bills for a national monument in 1867, but funding never materialized. The proposed designs were g...

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Image: Jeff Kubina | CC BY-SA 2.0

Lincoln Memorial: Yule Marble from Colorado

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sebastian Wallroth, CC BY 3.0. Bacon's exterior is a Doric temple in plan: 36 fluted columns - one for each state in the Union when Lincoln died - surround the building. Two more stand in the entry portico. The columns rise 44 feet, each assembled from 12 marble drums including the capital. The exterior claddi...

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Image: Sebastian Wallroth | CC BY 3.0

Lincoln Memorial: Two Speeches on the Walls

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit MC BSU, Public domain. Inside, the chamber is divided into three sections by two rows of Ionic columns. Lincoln sits in the central section. The north chamber bears the carved text of his second inaugural address - With malice toward none, with charity for all. The south chamber holds the Gettysburg Ad...

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Image: MC BSU | Public domain

Lincoln Memorial: The Memorial That Became a Stage

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit US postcard publisher, Public domain. The dedication took place on May 30, 1922. President Warren G. Harding accepted the memorial. Robert Todd Lincoln, then 78 and Lincoln's only surviving son, attended. So did prominent Black Americans, who discovered upon arrival that the U.S. Marines had assigned them a segregate...

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Image: US postcard publisher | Public domain

Lincoln Memorial: The Hands and the Undercroft

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sean Dudley, Public domain. Historian Gerald Prokopowicz has noted what some viewers have long suspected: French's Lincoln may hold his hands in shapes that approximate the American Sign Language letters A and L. French had a deaf son and was familiar with sign language. Lincoln, as president, had signed th...

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Image: Sean Dudley | Public domain