Reagan’s letterman sweater, Black Hawk’s autobiography featured in ongoing exhibit

Artifacts from the lives of Ronald Reagan and Black Hawk are part of an ongoing exhibit at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield.

“Here I Have Lived: Home in Illinois” includes items from the two, who both played significant roles in the history of the Sauk Valley.

The exhibit runs through Jan. 21 and is located in the museum’s Illinois Gallery, a space used for highlighting Illinois history as part of the museum’s role as the state historical library. The exhibit is free with regular museum admission.

“Illinois has welcomed refugees and entrepreneurs. It has produced artists and reformers. It offered a helping hand to some and a cold shoulder to others. Every one of them had a different idea of what it meant to call Illinois their home,” said Christina Shutt, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum. “What better way to connect with people of the past, both famous and unknown, than by focusing on the very personal idea of home.”

The exhibit explores the idea of “home” and the ways people made Illinois their home.

Reagan, born in Tampico, lived with his family in Chicago, Galesburg and Monmouth and settled in Dixon in 1820. Reagan attended Eureka College, and his letterman sweater is part of the display. The sweater is donated by the Ronald Reagan Museum at Eureka College.

Black Hawk was born in the vicinity of Rock Island on the Rock River. He became a warband leader of Sauks, Meskwakis and Kickapoos in a campaign against settlers in 1832. Dixon was a military headquarters during the conflict. A first edition of Black Hawk’s life story, “Autobiography of Ma-Ka-Tai-Me-She-Kia-Kiak, or Black Hawk, Embracing the Traditions of his Nation” also is on exhibit.

Another person from northern Illinois featured in the exhibit is Fred Francis, an architect and engineer, who built a home starting in 1889 in Henry County near Kewanee that featured the state’s first air conditioner to make life easier on his ailing wife.

“These men had almost nothing in common, but all three were determined to help other people the best way they knew how,” Shutt said.

In addition to those items, there will be a sculpture from the home of Abraham Lincoln, a table designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and a Supreme Court ruling that affected playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

The exhibit takes its name from a phrase Lincoln used when saying farewell to the city of Springfield for the final time: “Here I have lived a quarter of a century and have passed from a young to an old man. Here my children have been born, and one is buried. I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return …”

Visitors can listen to interviews with current Illinois residents, including Chicago artist and photographer Monica Boutwell discussing her Ho-Chunk and Potawatomi roots; Vietnam immigrant Patrick Lam, who became a U.S. citizen; Gabriela Ramirez about serving as an English translator at age 7 for her Mexican parents; and Mehul Trivedi’s experience of being raised in a Brahman Hindu home while attending a private Christian school.

The exhibit is sponsored in part by Isringhausen Imports of Illinois.

“What better way to connect with people of the past, both famous and unknown, than by focusing on the very personal idea of home.”

—  Christina Shutt, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

31 stories

Here are the 31 “stories of home” featured in the exhibit:

• Jane Addams, the social worker who won the Nobel Peace Prize for founding Hull House and trying to improve the lives of poor people across America
• Black Hawk, a Sauk leader who fought to reclaim his ancestral land in northern Illinois
• Margaret Burroughs, an artist and educator who turned her own home into a groundbreaking museum of Black history and art
• Cahokia Mounds resident, one of the people whose names have been lost to time but helped build a powerful city
• Harvey Clark, a Black man who simply wanted to rent an apartment in Cicero for his family but was met with terrifying violence by a white mob
• Susan Lawrence Dana, the Springfield socialite and activist with the foresight to hire Frank Lloyd Wright to build an incredible home
• Ritta DeFreitas, a dressmaker who came to Springfield from Portugal and got to know Abraham and Mary Lincoln
• Jean Baptiste Point de Sable, a Black trader who became the first non-Native to establish a permanent home in what is now Chicago
• Martha Douglas, the Southern-born wife of Sen. Stephen Douglas who inherited enslaved people from her father
• Benjamin Driggs, who grew up in Nauvoo when it was headquarters for the young Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Fred Francis, who used imagination and love to build an incredible, ahead-of-its-time home near Kewanee
• Betty Friedan, the Peoria-born author and activist who inspired a national debate on women’s rights with her book “The Feminine Mystique”
• R. Buckminster Fuller, the engineer and futurist who never stopped believing that technology could solve almost any social problem
• Charles Gibbs, a Springfield attorney who lived through a violent attack on the city’s Black residents by a white mob
• Mieczyslaw Haiman, the Polish immigrant who studied and promoted the relationship between his native country and his adopted home
• Lowney Handy, founder of a writers colony in east-central Illinois that produced, among other works, “From Here to Eternity.”
• Lorraine Hansberry, who turned her family’s experiences in a segregated Chicago neighborhood into the first Broadway play by a Black woman
• Buffie Ives, who stepped into the role of first lady of Illinois when the marriage of her brother, Gov. Adlai Stevenson, fell apart
• Hazel Johnson, an activist who helped establish the concept of environmental justice through her work on Chicago’s South Side
• Joseph Jordan, a resident of Pullman, the ultimate “company town,” during a period of groundbreaking labor unrest
• Mary Lincoln, the president’s wife whose many homes were beset by tragedy
• Robert Lincoln, the president’s son who found true happiness by leaving Illinois
• Free Frank McWorter, who bought himself and his family out of slavery and then founded a town
• Oscar Micheaux, who was born in poverty but became a novelist and pioneering Black filmmaker
• Michelle Obama, the attorney and first lady who grew up in Chicago with parents who valued education
• Louisa Phifer, a mother of seven who kept a Fayette County farm going while her husband served in the Civil War
• Richard Pryor, the groundbreaking comedian and actor who survived an abusive childhood in Peoria
• Ronald Reagan, lifeguard, college football player, actor and the only U.S. president born in Illinois
• Don Alonzo Spaulding, a surveyor in the 1830s whose maps encouraged settlement of Illinois even though it was already occupied by native tribes
• Tina Turner, who was born in Tennessee but began her journey into music history in East St. Louis
• Ida Wells-Barnett, the journalist and activist who documented the horrors of lynching

If you go

Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum

212 N. Sixth St., Springfield, IL 62701

Open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; closed New Year’s Day, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day

Last tickets sold at 4 p.m.

General admission is $15, with discounts for children, students, seniors and members of the military