Lincoln Memorial Shrine

Author's Comments

I almost did not believe it the first time someone told me. A Lincoln memorial in Redlands, the only one of its kind west of the Mississippi, tucked into a park most people drive past on their way somewhere else. It sounds like the start of a tall tale and turns out to be entirely true. The building is small and strange and lovely. Octagonal limestone, a hybrid of Romanesque and Egyptian that should not work and somehow does, set down in the middle of a mature park where the trees have had nearly a century to fill in around it. Morning is the hour. The light comes through the canopy in pieces, the reflecting pool picks up the pale stone, and the whole scene takes on a quiet that feels borrowed from somewhere much older and farther east. I come here in winter mostly. The crowds are nonexistent in any season, but winter mornings give you the clearest air and the longest shadows on the limestone. Spring is good too, when the grounds soften and the library next door, that wild Moorish-Romanesque pile, photographs especially well in the same light. Do not rush between the two buildings. They belong to each other. This is not a place that announces itself. It rewards the visitor who slows down, walks the perimeter, notices the carved details, lets the strangeness of finding Lincoln in a Southern California park become part of the experience. Free to enter, open most days, and almost always empty in the early hours. I keep it on my list of places to send people who think they have already seen Redlands.

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