LINCOLN, Ill. — This friendly outpost in the cornfields has just one claim to fame. And lately, some folks have been thinking they're not making all they could of it.
Looking to honor the gangly president who gave Lincoln its good name -- and, not incidentally, to draw tourists by the tens of thousands -- civic boosters have proposed building an Honest Abe theme park, capped off with a towering 30-story statue of the man himself.
They envision animatronic displays of Civil War history; a working model of a 19th century frontier farm; a water park; a toboggan run; miniature golf; bumper cars; and stovepipe hats aplenty.
"It's a great theme to use," said Rob Orr, the city's economic development director. He can just picture the rail-splitting motif on a miniature golf course. "To play off of Lincoln? It's a natural."
Not everyone, though, is sold.
Loren Holmes, a barber, delicately suggests that a Lincoln Land might not suit the president's reputation as a sober man of thought: "It wouldn't do him any good, I don't imagine."
"Can you just quote my laughter?" asked Richard Norton Smith, director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, which is under construction 30 miles south, in Springfield.
Aiming for a more diplomatic tone, Ron Keller, curator of the local Lincoln College Museum, offered this: "In the attempt to honor someone, sometimes we can go a little overboard."
He paused. "I'm envisioning kids on a 'Lincoln Log' shooting down a roller coaster. No."
Invoking images of Disneyland, the project's backers promise to build a dignified family attraction, not a kitschy carnival. "They would do it right," said Art Schutte, a theme park developer out of Cincinnati. He has pledged to raise enough money to build the park if the city can come up with the first $20 million from a corporate sponsor.
"There would be nothing degrading about this," Schutte said. "It's a great idea. It's called edu-tainment."
The city hasn't settled on any specifics for the park. The possibilities, though, are endless. Union and Confederacy bumper cars? Robert E. Lee's Last (souvenir) Stand? A Hallowed Ground mini-golf course? "Scream on the roller coaster of Black Dog depression!" suggested an editorial in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, about 100 miles southwest of Lincoln. "Give the last full measure of devotion on the Better Angels of our Nature thrill ride!"
