On September 24, 1868, Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the late president, married Mary Harlan, the eldest child of Iowa Senator James A. Harlan. Senator Harlan, who had actively campaigned for Abraham Lincoln in both 1860 and 1864, had been appointed Secretary of the Interior at the beginning of President Lincoln’s second term, but did not assume office until after Lincoln’s assassination. Policy differences with President Andrew Johnson led Harlan to resign his cabinet post in the summer of 1866. Soon thereafter the Iowa legislature returned him to the Senate, where he continued to represent the state until 1872.

Failing of re-election that year, James Harlan returned to his home town of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, where in 1876 he had the present Harlan-Lincoln House built on the northern edge of the Iowa Wesleyan College campus. (Harlan had been president of that institution in the mid-1850s, and taught there intermittently after leaving the Senate.) Mt. Pleasant was a few hours train ride from Robert and Mary Harlan Lincoln’s home in Chicago, and during the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Harlan-Lincoln House became a frequent summer retreat for the Lincolns and their children, Mary, Abraham Lincoln II, and Jessie. In 1907, Mary Harlan Lincoln donated the house to Iowa Wesleyan College as a memorial to her father, who had died in 1899.

Today the College operates the Harlan-Lincoln House as a museum. Its collection of Lincolniana includes a fragment of the collar of the coat President Lincoln wore to Ford’s Theater, one of Mary Todd Lincoln’s mourning veils, and a musical organ made to order for Robert Todd Lincoln. In 2004, the Lincoln Group of the District of Columbia contributed $500 towards the renovation of the Harlan-Lincoln House, and the LGDC is listed as one of the museum’s supporters on a bronze plaque inside the front door. The Harlan-Lincoln House is open on special occasions or by appointment. Inquiries about visiting the House should be sent to the office of the Iowa Wesleyan College Archives at iwcarch@iwc.edu.

Three sites near Mt. Pleasant are closely linked to Abraham Lincoln’s campaign for the Senate against Stephen A. Douglas. The fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate was held on October 7, 1858, sixty miles east of Mt. Pleasant at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. The debate took place on a wooden platform erected on the east side of Knox College’s Old Main building, the only debate site still in existence. The platform had no stairs, so Lincoln, Douglas and the other participants had to step onto it through a second story window. (After stepping thorough the Old Main window, Lincoln is said to have joked that at last he had "been through college.")

After the debate, Lincoln travelled by train to the Mississippi River town of Oquawka, Illinois, where he gave a campaign speech on October 8. At least one building from Lincoln’s time still stands in Oquawka. The Henderson County Courthouse was built in 1843, making it the second oldest courthouse in Illinois continuously used for judicial purposes. Stephen A. Douglas, then a judge on the Illinois Supreme Court, presided at the first court session held there.

From Oquawka, Lincoln took a steamboat ten miles downstream to Burlington, Iowa (about twenty five miles east of Mt. Pleasant), at the invitation of Iowa governor James W. Grimes. Lincoln stayed at Grimes’ house in Burlington and spoke to an audience of two thousand on October 9 at a hall Grimes owned at the northeast corner of Main and Valley Streets. Neither Grimes’ hall nor his house still stands, but there is an historical marker at the site of the speech (currently occupied by a drive-through bank). Following his Burlington speech, Lincoln stayed at the Grimes house an extra day to polish his notes for the sixth debate with Douglas, held in Quincy, Illinois on October 13th.