America Remembers Her Sixteenth President
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The western extremity of the National Mall is home to the country’s memorial
to America’s sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln. The Lincoln Memorial
was the creation of Henry Bacon, in the neoclassical manner, like the old
Greek shrines. The Lincoln Memorial is close to 100 feet in height, 190
feet in length and 119 feet in width. The Memorial features a peristyle
consisting of 38 fluted pillars in the Doric style. Thirty six of these
thirty eight pillars symbolize the number of states that were in existence
when Lincoln passed away. There are two additional pillars in-antis near
the entrance and the colonnade. You can read the carved versions of Lincoln’s
famous speeches – the Gettysburg Address and his second Inaugural Address.
The famous, huge statue of Abraham Lincoln musing is situated in the large
room that has the north chamber on one side and the south chamber on the
other. The artist in stone Daniel Chester French, supervised the creation
of Lincoln’s statue. The actual sculpting was done over a period of four
years by the Piccirilli brothers, whose work measures 19 feet in height
and weighs 175 tons. The statue turned out to be 9 feet higher than planned,
since the initial size of the figure would have made it too small for the
space it was to occupy. So the statue was made 19 feet rather than 10 feet
high in order to [prevent the figure losing visual impact in such a large
space.
When Abraham Lincoln died in 1867, the original ideas for his memorial included
the inclusion of huge figures in riding, standing and walking poses around
a statue of Lincoln that was to be a dozen feet in height. Insufficient
money caused the shelving of these plans and when Congress gave the project
of constructing the Lincoln Memorial the green light in 1910, many of the
original ideas were dropped.
Millions of people come to see the Lincoln Memorial annually, and many protests
and public meetings are held here. For example, in 1963, the Lincoln memorial
was the venue of Martin Luther King Jr.’s widely quoted oration, ‘I Have
a Dream’. Since so many people have been coming here, the Lincoln Memorial
has been subject to damage, and the Memorial is now under a process of renovation.
You can get to the Lincoln
Memorial, which is situated in the same row as the Washington
Monument and the US Capitol in West Potomac Park, by alighting at the Smithsonian
stop from the Metro. The Memorial is open to visitors from 8 am to 11.45
pm all through the year. Christmas Day is the only day on which the Memorial
is closed.
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