Lincoln and Chicago History

The Chicago Historical Society holds its regular quarterly meeting.  Attorney Isaac N. Arnold reads a letter from sculptor Leonard W. Volk, currently in Rome, whom the Society has commissioned to carve a marble bust of Abraham Lincoln.  The late president sat for Volk in Chicago during April of 1860, a few months before he was elected.  Volk claims that he sensed at the time that Lincoln would soon be leader of the nation, and, with that in mind, “was desirous of making a faithful representation of him, without a wish to flatter his remarkably rugged and striking features, but make him just as he was, so that posterity might look at [the bust] and know it as a veritable and faithful likeness.”