In letters to his accidental fiancée, the future president painted Springfield, Illinois, as a bummer.

It’s not that you should never hop from one state to another for a relationship. But if you happen to fall hard for someone in Illinois while visiting from Kentucky, you probably want to be very sure that the object of your affection reciprocates your feelings before you uproot your life. That’s how things got messy for Abraham Lincoln’s ex-girlfriend, Mary Owens.
Born in 1808, the daughter of a successful planter from Kentucky, Owens was 24 when she first met Lincoln in 1833. (Abe, still nearly 30 years away from the presidency, was 24, too.) Owens had traveled from Green County, Kentucky, to visit her married sister Elizabeth Abell in New … Read the rest