The Lincoln Center includes:
- More than 18,000 books and pamphlets, including books owned by Lincoln and his family
- Thousands of 19th-century photographs, including the Lincoln Family Album Collection of photographs owned by the Lincolns and their descendants
- Manuscript collections, including the Insanity File related to Mary Lincoln’s commitment to Bellevue Place sanitarium
- Documents related to Lincoln’s youth in Kentucky and Indiana
- Extensive genealogical collections on the Hanks and Lincoln families
- election tickets, poll books, campaign literature, broadsides, and other political material
- 19th-century maps
- Civil War diaries and letters
- Mid-19th-century newspapers chronicling the Lincoln Administration, the Civil War, and Lincoln’s assassination and funeral
- Lincoln-related documents, including many signed by Lincoln.
In addition, the extensive subject files of newspaper clippings, correspondence, and other materials comprise a trove of information available nowhere else in the world.
Many Lincoln Center materials are now online for the public to research, too. Researchers have access to over 10,000 full-text books, pamphlets, newspapers, and subject files and more than 1,800 photographs - as well as - the collection’s art and artifacts housed at the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis.
The Lincoln Center at ACPL is open during library hours, are tours of the collection are available as well for a deeper dive.
To learn about programming and events, and to discover selected items from the collection, please visit the Lincoln Collection's website at the Allen County Public Library.
This post was originally published in 2013 and has been revised and updated.
