Casual

...One of my favorite Indiana landmarks is less conventional than the others...

...Both experiences acquainted him with a range of human life unusual in the experience of a pioneer boy...

...The tunes, relying heavily on the gimmicks of country music, could be more tuneful, and a few of the dance numbers go on too long...

...In 1827 Abraham Lincoln passed this way," it read, "and joked and wrestled with the local boys...

...Then the lights come up and the drama unfolds to the tireless descant of cicadas and crickets...

...With the departure of Bobby Knight for Texas and the declining career of Florence Henderson, Lincoln just might be the most prominent Hoosier of them all...

...We were in Indiana this month, these three Hoosiers and I, driving a rented van through the rolling hills that lie below Bloomington...

...for on that knoll over yonder, just beyond the parking lot, Nancy Hanks really does lie buried...

...Here Lincoln had his first job, piloting a ferry across the river, and here he embarked for his first look at the outside world, hopping a flatboat bound for New Orleans...

...I don't claim the show would be to everyone's taste...

...With the lights dimming onstage, watching the young cast members hug one another goodbye, I wondered why the state legislature didn't understand this too...

...Most were put up in the 1920s and '30s, by a generation that has passed away and that might seem, to a contemporary eye, as remote as the man the markers were meant to honor...

...Andrew Ferguson...

...Plentiful as they are, you begin to notice something about the Lincoln markers as you wander Indiana: They're old, really old...

...Illinois gets all the Lincoln props, being the place where he grew from a young to an old man, but Indiana can claim him, too...

...The players got a standing ovation the night we showed up...

...But in my opinion the charm of the production, its purity of intent, overpowers all quibbles...

...It proved a newer generation of Hoosiers was still willing to ennoble the place they live in by conjuring up the memory of their favorite son...

...Whether this circumstance gives me kibitzing rights, allowing me to second-guess the actions of the Indiana state legislature as it tries to balance the state budget, I don't know...

...By the time Lincoln moved to Illinois he'd become a man, and a worldly one...

...For years Hoosiers were pleased with the association and eager to draw attention to it...

...This is partly a matter of place...

...He came to Indiana with his family as an eight-year-old boy in 1817 and spent the next 13 years there...

...In keeping with a peculiar obsession of mine, we were looking for landmarks in the life of Abraham Lincoln...

...Southern Indiana is thick with Lincoln markers...

...When one of the characters looks out over the footlights and imagines the "knoll over yonder" where Nancy Hanks, Lincoln's mother, lies buried, the moment carries a special tremor...

...But I'm going to any-way—kibitz, I mean...

...Young Abe Lincoln" was also a marker of a sort: evidence that the urge to commemorate Lincoln hadn't died away from Indiana altogether...

...Stopping for ice cream one hot afternoon in Grandview, a dot of a town on the bank of the Ohio River, I nearly drove the van into an old stone pile rising unexpectedly next to a convenience store...

...The Indiana legislature has cut its $200,000 subsidy, dooming the production unless some other sponsor can be found—an unlikely prospect...

...The Lincoln Amphitheater, an open-air venue set deep in a second-growth forest, lies about 40 miles from Evansville, across the state road from Lincoln Boyhood National Park, which encompasses the 50 acres the Lincolns farmed during their years in Indiana...

...For 17 summers the amphitheater has staged a musical called "Young Abe Lincoln," an idealized account of his Hoosier upbringing...

...The marker here is laconic in the Hoosier manner, but if you know what you're looking at, the place is full of meaning...

...The young performers exhibit the same fresh-faced wholesomeness that used to send people screaming from their homes whenever Up With People or the Osmonds appeared on the Ed Sullivan show...

...But then one of the actors stepped forward to announce that this performance of "Young Abe Lincoln" would be the last, not just for this season but forever...

...The proscenium opens out into the woods, so you can see the trees darken as the sun sets...

...A few miles away, Anderson's Creek empties into the Ohio river, forming a little estuary shaded by locust and poplar trees...

...Bolted to it was an ancient metal plaque, weathered to green...