Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
Cost: $115 million

The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is a 200,000-sq-ft. complex in downtown Springfield that presents the life story of the revered 16th president.

More than 47,000 pieces in the state of Illinois' priceless Abraham Lincoln Collection - the world's largest - will be stored in the buildings.

Included are nearly 1,500 original manuscripts Lincoln wrote, about 1,200 prints and photographs and approximately 230 artifacts, such as the ink well and desk used to draft the First Inaugural Address.

Perhaps the project's highlight is the museum's Treasure Gallery where the display will include the Gettysburg Address in Lincoln's hand, the Emancipation Proclamation with his signature and the Second Inaugural Address that advocated a post-Civil War reconstruction plan, "With malice toward none, with charity for all."

Clad in copper and shaped in a circle, the space mirrors a display of the Crown Jewels in the Tower of London.

Visitors enter the museum through a grand hallway that opens onto a plaza in the building center featuring a 70-ft.-tall atrium.

From there they will have the option to seeing major exhibits: the Treasure Gallery, a children's area, two different theaters and reproductions of major events in Lincoln's life in two parts, Journey One and Journey Two.

New Space Needed

The three-story library is being built in part because the Lincoln Collection exceeded the capacity of its previous space beneath the Old State Capitol.

In addition to books and manuscripts, the library contains the largest number of Lincoln materials from before his presidency. This includes the Lincoln Legal Papers Project, an effort to document every case in his storied legal career.

The library's main depository for the 10,000 books, manuscripts and other printed material will be the basement.

Valuable documents will be stored in a basement vault or on the second floor.

An elevator not for public use will be used to ferry documents where they are needed.

Besides stacks, other spaces will hold reading rooms, classrooms, offices, audio-visual room, pressroom, conference room, photography studio and dark room, cataloguing area and conservation laboratory.

|The library will be open to the public and serve the needs of serious Lincoln scholars.

The nearby Union Station, a railroad depot originally built in the 1890s, is to be renovated as part of the project and serve as a visitors' center with parking.

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