Lincoln Memorial (Washington, D.C.)

www.nps.gov/linc/index.htm

The Lincoln Monument Association was incorporated by the United States Congress in March 1867 to build a memorial to Lincoln. Little progress was made until the site was chosen in 1901, in an area that was swampland. Congress formally authorized the memorial on February 9, 1911, and the first stone was put into place on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1914. The monument was dedicated by President Warren G. Harding on May 30, 1922, a ceremony attended by Lincoln's only surviving child, Robert Todd Lincoln. In 1923, designer Henry Bacon received the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects, his profession's highest honor, for the design of the memorial.

The focus of the memorial is Daniel Chester French's sculpture of Lincoln, seated. French studied many of Mathew Brady's photographs of Lincoln and depicted the President as worn and pensive, gazing eastwards down the Reflecting Pool at the capital's starkest emblem of the Union, the Washington Monument. Lincoln's left hand is clenched, his right is open. Beneath his hands, the Roman fasces, symbols of the authority of the Republic, are sculpted in relief on the seat.

The statue stands 19 feet (5.8 m) tall and 19 feet wide, and was carved by the Piccirilli Brothers of New York City in a studio in the Bronx from 28 blocks of white Georgia marble. There is also a small book shop inside the memorial, to the right of the entrance. The central cella is flanked by two others. In one, the Gettysburg Address is inscribed on its south wall, and in the other, Lincoln's second inaugural address is inscribed on its north wall. In the first column of Lincoln's second inaugural address, the word "Future" is misspelled, reading "Euture." Above the text of these speeches are a series of murals by Jules Guerin that show an angel, representing truth; freeing a slave (on the south wall, above the Gettysburg Address); and that depict the unity of the American North and South (above the Second Inaugural Address).

Standing apart from the somewhat triumphal and Roman manner of most of Washington, the memorial takes the severe form of a Greek Doric temple. It is 'peripteral,' with 36 massive columns, each 33 feet (10 m) high, entirely surrounding the cella of the building itself, which rises above the porticos. As an afterthought, the 36 columns required for the design were seen to represent the 36 U.S. states at the time of Lincoln's death, and their names were inscribed in the entablature above each column. The names of the 48 states of the Union when the memorial was completed are carved on the exterior attic walls, and a later plaque commemorates the admission of Alaska and Hawaii.

Originally under the care of the Office of Public Buildings and Public Parks, it was transferred to the National Park Service on August 10, 1933.
Categories: memorial, monument, NRHP - National Register of Historic Places, 1922_construction, Beaux-Arts (architecture)
Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Memorial
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Coordinates:  38°53'21"N 77°3'0"W
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Comments

  • This is my favorite presidental memorial.
  • As seen in the film "The Day The Earth Stood Still".
  • Ironically Congressman Abraham Lincoln, in 1848, presented theses words. "Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable - a most sacred right - a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world."