Primarily, Lincoln's 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar, a bar, restaurant and casino, once had 10,000 silver dollars mounted and on display on the walls and was known as the
World Famous 10,000 Silver Dollar Bar. When they hit 50,000 silver dollars the name became the
50,000 Silver Dollar Bar. They no longer have 50,000 silver dollars. The day we visited, the count had risen to 71,047, with silver dollars under the bar, covering the walls, hanging from the ceiling, pretty much everywhere they can fit a few more silver dollars.
Lincoln's 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar has one more interesting attraction -
Honest Abe himself:
In keeping with the surname of the family who started the business in 1952, and whose descendants still operate it, there is even a wood carving of
Honest Abe, Abraham Lincoln, in the bar. A folk art sculpture of Lincoln, it was done in wood, carved from a section of what was probably a local pine or spruce tree. About life sized, he stands under a small part of the collection of silver dollars. The carving is quite well done, a very good likeness of the subject, complete with long coat, vest, bow tie, top hat and umbrella.
The establishment was begun in 1952, so
Honest Abe could well be over a half century old now, though we have no information concerning his real age.
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln became the United States’ 16th President in 1861, issuing the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy in 1863.
Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”
Lincoln thought secession illegal, and was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun...
...Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg: “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain–that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom–and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Lincoln won reelection in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.
The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds….”
On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln’s death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.
From The Whitehouse