Photo of the Day

It is February 12, 1909, the one hundredth birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

Marshall Field & Co. department store in Chicago's Loop draped with bunting for Lincoln's 100th birthday.

It is a day of national celebration.

Left: New York's Herald Square, 1909. Right: The Manhattan Bridge under construction, 1909.

At 8:00 AM in New York City, cannon blasts from nearby military forts, battleships in the harbor and National Guard field batteries fired a birthday salute.

Booker T. Washington (1856 - 1915) speaks in New York's Carnegie Hall, 1909.

And civil rights leader Booker T. Washington delivered an address to the Republican Club at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

He told his audience that, as a young child born into slavery, he had often awakened to his mother’s prayer that Lincoln would succeed and one day set him free.

Julia Ward Howe (1819 - 1910).

In Boston, ninety-year-old Julia Ward Howe, who in 1861 wrote the lyrics to “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” addressed a joint session of the Massachusetts state legislature, reciting a new poem written in Lincoln’s honor.

Left: President Theodore Roosevelt at the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Hodgenville, Kentucky, on Lincoln’s 100th birthday. Right: Roosevelt wore this ring containing Lincoln’s hair at his second inauguration, March 4, 1905.

In Hodgenville, Kentucky, President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of a memorial building which would shelter the log cabin of Lincoln’s birth.

Left: President Woodrow Wilson (1856 - 1924) shown in 1913. Right: Chicago's Auditorium Theatre, built in 1889.

Woodrow Wilson, then Princeton’s president and contemplating a presidential run in 1912, spoke at Chicago’s Auditorium Theatre.

He asked:

“Can we have other Lincolns?

We cannot do without them.

This country is going to have crisis after crisis.”

People in line at the Treasury Building in Washington to obtain a new "Lincoln Cent" coin, minted in honor of his 100th birthday, August 1909.

Spurred on by President Theodore Roosevelt, the US Mint was working on a new design for the penny which would bear Lincoln’s likeness.

The new Lincoln cent would be struck in August.

Percy MacKaye (1875-1956), American playwright and poet, shown in 1907.

The tributes to Lincoln were many on this day.

But none were more moving than poet Percy MacKaye’s.

He wrote a lengthy ode to Lincoln in commemoration of his centenary.

Lincoln with Willie and Tad at his Springfield home, 1860.

Here is a small portion:

Lincoln with Gen. George McClellan at Antietam, Maryland, Oct. 3, 1862.

And such was he:

beyond the pale of song

His grandeur looms in truth, with awful grace;

He lives where beauty's origins belong

Deep in the primal raptures of his race.

Lincoln delivers his Gettysburg Address, November 19, 1863.

Yet may we strive to trace

His shadow — where it pulses vast

Upon imagination, cast

By the oft-handtrimm'd lamp of history —

In carved breath, or bronze, that we may scan

The imagined child and man

Young Theodore Roosevelt watches Lincoln's New York funeral procession from an upstairs window, April 25, 1965.

Whose life and death are looms of our own destiny.

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I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda