Day 7 (Friday, 9/16) - Tell City to Rockport, IN

I awoke this day to the pleasant reality that no major burdens awaited me. I had identified the (one and only?) taxi company in the area the night before and learned that I could ride to Rockport for a reasonable fee. As the bird flies, Rockport is only 16 miles or so from Tell City, but that straight line overflies the Ohio River twice as the river makes a lazy loop northward. The on the ground distance is more like 22 miles, 6 of which I had walked round-trip the previous day. After a no-frills bagel and cream cheese breakfast (with the rail-thin fellow at the next table enjoying his sugared cereal and frosted donut), I stuffed the backpack and awaited my ride.

The driver of the cab was the owner of the company; it was not part of his plan to be a driver, he said, but it was difficult to hire drivers because the business was not sufficient to insure a good income. He was another one of the micro-entrepreneurs I kept running into. He had owned a lube shop and sold it, had an equipment rental company in addition to the taxi business, and now was having a building put up to house his businesses and escape the monthly rental payments. The area had been without taxi service for a couple of years until he started his enterprise recently. He was able to get a contract with a local government agency and now provides transportation of Medicaid patients to health care facilities. It is astounding the territory his taxi service covers. He was driving me more than 20 miles (which is doubled to get him back to home base) and during the ride, he negotiated by cell phone another trip that would put 100 more miles on his cab.

He dropped me off at the bed and breakfast in Rockport, a cozy old house with a restaurant on the first floor. It was located right across the street from the Carnegie Library building, one of the facilities of the Spencer County library system. I made my way there to catch up on blogging. I also took a few moments to look at various Lincoln art items on the walls and at the special Lincoln book collection. Understandably, there were a number of titles dealing with Lincoln's youth and time in Indiana. I found some privately published titles that I had never seen before. This library and its collection may merit a more leisurely visit some day. The library is an architectural delight; modern additions to the original Carnegie building contain wonderful workspaces bathed in natural light. As in every library I've visited, a small collection of Internet workstations attracted a lot of use. It's hard to believe that just over a decade ago, when the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science did its first study of Internet in public libraries, only one library in ten offered public access to the Internet.

Rockport's connection with Lincoln is limited and in a way, manufactured. Lincoln definitely visited the town in his thirties on a visit to Indiana in 1844 when he was campaigning for the Whig candidate for president, Henry Clay. The tavern he stayed in is no longer there, but not one but two historical markers note his visit. The major Lincoln site, however, didn't exist during his time. On the outskirts of town, within a fine municipal park, is the Lincoln Pioneer Village. I walked out there to discover (or rediscover, for I had read it earlier on their website) that the village was only open by appointment on weekdays. I could come back the next day and walk the grounds, but I planned to cover a lot of distance Saturday, so I just chalked up this site as a place to be visited on some future trip. The log cabin reconstructions in this park are copies of cabins from other locations in Indiana, for example, the cabin Lincoln's sister and only sibling moved to when she married and in which she and her son were to die during childbirth. Most of these structures were placed here by the WPA during the 30s. The cabins give a good indication of what life on the frontier must have been like and I look forward to a chance to see them up close some day.

I walked back to town, picked up some literature at the Lincolnland Economic Development office, and headed to the riverbank. Close to water level, I took some photos and then headed back up past the site of Lincoln's visit and then to a bluff overlooking the river: What a view, and what great houses had been built to enjoy the view!

I had dinner in the dining room of the B&B and then one final task faced me before I could call it a day. A mile roundtrip by foot to the laundromat and I was able to refill my backpack with fresh clothes for the weekend ahead.

Twenty-five percent of my Lincoln Trek was now behind me.