If you’ve never visited Farmington or spent time studying about Lincoln, you may not know that the 16th president was best friends with Joshua Speed, who was born and raised at Farmington. In fact, one of the topics we spend time talking about with guests to the plantation is Lincoln’s visit in 1841. I will probably talk more about that visit in future posts. For now, though, I will focus on how Joshua and Lincoln met.
Becoming a docent at Farmington has prompted me to be constantly on the lookout for things that connect the Speed family to Abraham Lincoln. I recently ran across an entertaining book called These Honored Dead: A Lincoln Speed Mystery by Jonathan Putnam. The book is the first in a series that fictionally casts Lincoln and Speed as the Holmes and Watson of the early American prairie. The novels, in which Mr. Putnam utilizes the setting and characters to create his stories, are fun to read and are a great introduction to life in the early 1840s. Readers, however, have to remember that the stories are fictional with actual history woven in.
As would be expected, Mr. Putnam begins his book series with Lincoln and Joshua Speed meeting for the first time. When I began preparing to be a docent at Farmington, I studied some material that included information about this first meeting between the two young men. Unsurprisingly, the account that I read in These Honored Dead did not exactly match what I had studied a few years ago. But, Putnam’s version of the meeting was just close enough to what I had learned to make me question what historians really know about this introduction. So, I decided to look further into this first encounter between Joshua and Lincoln. That will be the focus of the next few posts.
Until next time, All my best to you,
David