Several walking tours have been planned that will take you on routes Lincoln may have taken during his visit to Lexington in 1847. At the time, there were four African American Churches. First Baptist (African), Pleasant Green Baptist, St. Paul Methodist and Asbury Methodist had been well established and functioning before 1847. Union Benevolent Society of Colored People founded by freed men had been providing for those less fortunate since 1843.
Abraham had married Mary Ann Todd, a native of Lexington, in 1842. Her father and his second wife and her grandmother where still living at the time the family visited. The Todd home on Main Street was only three city blocks from the Courthouse Square which sits in the middle of the downtown district. The Parker home on Short Street was about the same distance.
From city directories and written histories, it has been determined that Lincoln would have seen homes and businesses of freed men and women that were on both streets. Samuel Oldham, his wife Daphney and family lived on Main Street above the store Samuel was operating as a barber shop and mercantile business. Lawson Hawkins operated a confectionary in an adjacent store front. Those who lived and worked on Short Street were Parker Peay, a shoe maker, Baron Stueben, a barber, and Wilcher Breckinridge, a porter.
Lincoln may have encountered some of them and even engaged them in conversation. We do know that Lincoln knew and associated with African Americans in Springfield; his barber was William Florville, a free black. John Roll, a carpenter, in an interview in the 1890s stated that Lincoln had said of him "This is my old friend John Roll, he used to be a slave, but he had made himself free, and I used to be a slave, and now I am so free that they let me practice Law." (Recollected Words of Abraham Lincoln, p383)
Lexington had become one of the largest slave trading markets of the south. Slave auctions were regularly conducted at Cheapside located on the west side of the courthouse. There were slave jails- buildings which held the enslaved for sale- on Short Street, Broadway and Main Street, all within walking distance of the Todd and Parker homes where Lincoln would have stayed and visited. There were also enslaved who worked in the businesses in town and for the town council doing odd jobs. During the weeks of Lincoln's stay, there were slave auctions on Cheapside. These sales were not only attended by potential buyers but also spectators which generated a crowd around the square.
Lincoln could not have missed observing this and being affected by what he saw.
Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln's Journey to Emancipation is a national traveling panel exhibition that examines Lincoln's movement toward the abolition of slavery. The exhibit was produced by the Huntington Library in San Marion, California and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, New York City in cooperation with the American Library Association Public Programs Office. Funding for the exhibit has been provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission created by Congress. It has been traveling throughout the United States since the fall of 2006 and is scheduled through the spring of 2010.