In 1829, eleven years after Illinois became the twenty-first state, New Salem was founded on a bluff above the Sangamon River at a place where the river bends sharply north from its westerly course. Its life span can be measured in what the poet Robert Burns described as “short and simple annals”, lasting from 1829 to 1840 when it no longer existed. Abraham Lincoln lived there from mid-summer 1831 until April 1837 arriving there a “strange[r], friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat—at ten dollars per month.” Outside and to the left of the entrance to the visitor center and museum at today’s New Salem there is a statue by Avard Fairbanks, The Resolute Lincoln, depicting him with an axe in one hand and a book in the other hand. The sculpture speaks volumes about how Lincoln’s New Salem years shaped him from a person with limited education and prospects into the person he became. However, he did not accomplish all of this in a vacuum. The people who befriended the “strange[r], friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working on a flatboat—at ten dollars per month” were critical to the shaping of Abraham Lincoln. The residents of New Salem accepted and befriended Lincoln, provided him with employment opportunities, encouraged him in his ambitions to succeed, helped to educate him, honored him with their trust and votes, and tended to his needs. In the 1925 biography, The Life of Abraham Lincoln, William E. Barton wrote: “New Salem has been rightly called Lincoln’s Alma Mater.”