John Hanes’ Horse Barn
By Abraham Lincoln 

This barn housed race horses. I never saw them race but when I was small John still had a horse or two in this barn. 

Gordon, Ohio, where this barn is still located, and where I was born, was a bustling village of a hundred or two families between 1848, when the village was platted, and 1860. There was a man, south of town, who did have a race track built for horse races and no doubt John Hanes raced his horses there. The track was gone when I was growing up and Melvin Clem, the town’s lawman, lived in the house with the torrent on the side. 

And people came from cities as far away as Dayton, Ohio, on the Dayton and Union (D&U) railroad, when it began running passenger trains, just to see the races. They would get off and visit the tavern run by Bryan Kitt, (where the Women’s Christian Temperance Union would later set off two sticks of dynamite and blow the doors down) for a drink or cross the street and visit Sam Jones’ butcher shop and set down to coffee, or tea and a sandwich. 

Ladies in big flowing dresses and sprouting umbrellas walked beside men in dark suits and shined shoes with spats. Imagine that. At the same time, the streets were dirt or mud (depending on the weather) and little Ruth Rice, the blacksmith’s daughter, was out on the street hulling corn and feeding piglets on Perry Street, opposite the train station. 

When I took the photograph of the barn I remembered that John’s woods was as clean as a park and was on the right side of this barn, and that it was home to the annual “Virginia Reunions.” Then the croquet court was full of ladies and gentlemen laughing and smoking and knocking balls through wickets. 

I was not a relative of anybody at any reunion held there but as a kid I could go anywhere. And the sound of an airplane was more than enough to attract my attention. So I was there the day a bi-plane landed and took people at the reunion rides for the ungodly sum of $2.00. 

I never got to fly. I didn’t have money. Two dollars came after mother spent a month washing and ironing Herb Hamel’s clothes. But some people always had money and flew off into the blue. I was just fortunate to have lived then and can remember how life was when I was a little boy. 

Abraham Lincoln