The Geographic Names Information System of the U.S. Geological Survey lists 191 U.S. parks named “Lincoln.” Perhaps the most famous is the Lincoln Park in Chicago, Illinois. Chicago’s largest public park at more than 1,200 acres, Lincoln Park was established in 1860 and named for Abraham Lincoln shortly after his death in 1865. The park was gradually expanded seven miles to the north and south through the 1950s as part of Daniel Burnham’s famous 1909 Plan of Chicago, which called for complete public access to the lakefront.

In one of the older sections of the park near North Avenue, where families took refuge in the park during the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, is Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s famous “Standing Lincoln” statue, unveiled in 1887. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jane Addams once wrote, “I walked the wearisome way from Hull-House to Lincoln Park…in order to look at and gain magnanimous counsel, if I might, from the marvelous St. Gaudens statue which had been but recently been placed at the entrance of the park. Some of Lincoln’s immortal words were cut into the stone at his feet, and never did a distracted town more sorely need the healing of ‘with charity towards all’ than did Chicago at that moment, and the tolerance of the man who had won charity for those on both sides of ‘an irrepressible conflict.’”

The statue was restored in 1989 by the Lincoln Park Conservancy’s Adopt-A-Monument Program, and 8,200 square feet of formal gardens were added in front of the monument.