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The town was officially named on August 27, 1853 in an unusual ceremony. Abraham Lincoln, having assisted with the platting of the town and working as counsel for the newly laid railroad which led to its founding, was asked to participate in a naming ceremony for the town. During the proceedings, Lincoln chose a ripe watermelon from a nearby wagon, broke it open, and squeezed the juice on the grounds, as an informal rite of baptism.The first approach of Europeans to the Pacific Northwest was by sea. During the eighteenth century Spain, Portugal, England and France explored the Pacific Coast looking for natural resources and a Northwest Passage through the continent. As early as 1572 Sir Francis Drake explored the area, naming it New Albion. Contact with Native Americans remained undocumented until 1788, when Robert Haswell, Captain Robert Gray’s first mate, wrote in the ship’s log of an encounter with two native men in a canoe near the mouth of the Salmon River.
The first recorded tourists came in August of 1837. Reverend Jason Lee, his new bride Anna Marie Pittman, Mr. Cyrus Shepard with his wife, Susan Downing, and their guide, Joseph Gervais came by horseback from the Willamette Valley to the coast along the Salmon River Trail. They camped in a grove of trees near the sea in what was later the Oceanlake area. Here the two couples enjoyed a belated honeymoon, bathing in the surf and relishing many clam and fish bakes. Their journals indicate that they very much enjoyed the unspoiled coast and that their health improved after several weeks of sun and sea air.
Then in 1849, Lieutenant Theodore Talbot gives a detailed account of an exploratory trip he made to Siletz Bay. His journals mention encountering an old Indian man who told Talbot that he and his family were the “last lingering remnants of a large population that dwelt upon these waters.”
In 1855, the area became part of the Coast Reservation and still later, the Siletz Reservation. Homesteaders began arriving soon after Congress passed the Dawes Act in 1887. This act opened up Coast Reservation lands to white settlement and gave eighty acre “allotments” to reservation Indians. Native Americans, as well as white settlers, first inhabited land along the Siletz River, Siletz Bay and the Salmon River. Early settlers homesteaded the land and combined subsistence farming with fishing and hunting in order to survive on the isolated coast.
Kernville has the distinction of being the first town in this area. In 1896 Daniel Kern established the Kern Brothers Cannery. Located about five hundred feet above Coyote Rock on the Siletz River, it became the first major industry in North Lincoln County. Daniel’s brother John became the first postmaster when a post office was established at the cannery that same year.
The Siletz River was a fisherman’s paradise in those early years. Salmon abounded; so many you could see a constant disturbance in the water when the fish were going upriver to spawn. Homesteaders fished for extra income. The cannery provided a net, a cabin, net rack and a boat to use on credit. By the early 1920s, however, the numbers of fish were diminishing and new regulations in 1935 prohibited drift net fishing altogether.
The area then turned to logging for its industry. Many men saved their money and bought timber to log in the pioneering days of an industry that was to become the backbone of the northwest economy. These individuals were known as “gyppos”. After the earliest era of logging with oxen and mule, steam-powered “donkey” engines were used to pull logs out of the woods. When World War I brought the need for Sitka spruce, a wood that was both light enough and strong enough for airplanes, the industry flourished.
Lincoln College (chartered Lincoln University), a private two-year liberal arts college, was founded in early 1865 and granted 4 year degrees until 1929. News of the establishment and name of the school was communicated to President Lincoln shortly before his death making Lincoln the only college to be named after Lincoln while he was living. The College has an excellent collection of Abraham Lincoln related documents and artifacts, housed in a museum which is open to the general public.
The City of Lincoln was located directly on U.S. Route 66 from 1926 through 1978. This is its secondary tourist theme after the connection with Abraham Lincoln.
American author Langston Hughes spent some of his early years in Lincoln. Later on, he was to write to his eighth-grade teacher in Lincoln, telling her his writing career began there in the eighth grade, when he was elected class poet.
The City of Lincoln features the stone, three-story, domed Logan County Courthouse (1905), which is considered the second most architecturally spectacular surviving historic courthouse in Illinois' 102 Counties (after Carlinville in Macoupin County). This courthouse building replaced the earlier Logan County Courthouse (built 1853–54) where Lincoln once practiced law; the earlier building had fallen into serious decay and could not be saved. In addition, the Postville Courthouse State Historic Site contains a 1953 replica of the original 1840 Logan County courthouse; Postville, the original county seat, lost its status in 1848 and was itself annexed into Lincoln in the 1860s. |
