Lincoln Nomination
Honesdale, Wayne County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
In May, 1859, Horace Greeley met with notable political leaders to create a boom to nominate Abraham Lincoln for President. The events that ensued at the Republican National Convention in Chicago paralleled the strategy planned at the parley held in this building.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In May 1859, the influential editor Horace Greeley reportedly met with political allies in this building to lay groundwork for an unlikely presidential bid by Abraham Lincoln. The maneuvering echoed the coalition-building that would carry Lincoln to the Republican nomination at the 1860 Chicago convention. Such backroom parleys were where the anti-slavery Republican Party's strategy took shape on the eve of the sectional crisis.
Why it matters
It marks a moment in the political groundwork that produced Lincoln's improbable nomination — the decision that placed him in the White House as the Union faced secession and war.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the late 1850s, the country was coming apart over slavery. The old party system had shattered, and a young coalition calling itself Republican was scrambling to organize itself into something that could actually win a national election. Its members shared an opposition to slavery's expansion into the western territories, but they came from many directions — former Whigs, disaffected Democrats, antislavery reformers — and they did not yet agree on a candidate or a message.
Northeastern Pennsylvania in this era was a landscape of small towns, canal traffic, and growing anthracite coal wealth. Honesdale sat at the head of a gravity railroad and canal system that carried coal toward the cities of the seaboard, which meant local men here were plugged into the commercial and political currents of the wider North.
Into this charged moment stepped the newspaper editors and party organizers who understood that a presidential nomination was not won by speeches alone. It was won in advance, in conversations, in the quiet arithmetic of who could carry which states — the kind of work that happened in parlors and back rooms well before any convention gaveled to order.
People & events
The marker ties this building to Horace Greeley, the famous and famously restless editor of the New York Tribune, whose paper reached readers across the North and whose opinions could move a party. According to the marker, in the spring of 1859 Greeley met here with political leaders to begin building momentum — a "boom" — for the idea of nominating Abraham Lincoln for president.
At the time, Lincoln was far from the obvious choice. He had lost a US Senate race the year before and was known nationally mostly for his debates and his eloquence on the slavery question. Better-known men were considered front-runners for the Republican nomination. The notion that a one-term former congressman from Illinois might be the party's best bet was, in 1859, a genuinely long shot.
The marker's own claim is measured, and worth reading that way: it says the strategy discussed here "paralleled" what later unfolded at the 1860 Republican National Convention in Chicago. Whether any single meeting decided Lincoln's fate is not something the historical record settles cleanly, and the marker wisely does not overclaim. What it captures is the texture of how nominations were really made — through networks of editors and organizers testing names and lining up support long before the delegates arrived.
Its place in the American story
At the Chicago convention in the spring of 1860, the Republicans passed over their better-known contenders and nominated Lincoln — a candidate broadly acceptable across the party's factions and strong in the states it most needed to win. That autumn he was elected president, and his election triggered the secession crisis that led to the Civil War.
That sequence is why a small building in Honesdale earns a marker at all. The dramatic, world-changing moments of American history — a president elected, a union broken and refought — rest on top of unglamorous groundwork: the meetings, the letters, the coalition math done by people whose names most of us never learn.
This site is a reminder that democracy's biggest turns are often prepared in ordinary rooms. Long before Lincoln became the towering figure of the war years, he was a name that ambitious organizers were quietly floating to see whether it might carry — and places like this are where that testing happened.
If you visit
Stand in front of the marker and let the scale of the thing settle in. You are looking at an everyday building in a small Pennsylvania town, not a monument or a capitol — and that is exactly the point. The consequential politics of the 1850s happened in places like this, not only in grand halls.
Honesdale itself rewards a slow walk. It grew up around the canal and gravity-railroad trade that made this region matter in the mid-19th century, and the older streets still carry that flavor. Read the marker, then look around at the kind of town this was: connected enough to national affairs that a major New York editor's ideas could land here.
Treat this as a thinking stop rather than a spectacle. It pairs naturally with any Lincoln-era or Civil War road-trip theme, offering the "before" chapter — the maneuvering that set the stage — rather than the battlefields that came after. Bring your curiosity about how power actually gets organized, and this quiet corner has a lot to say.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Horace Greeley
- · Abraham Lincoln
Related events
- · 1860 Republican National Convention
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Civil War Prison Train Wreck
Shohola Township, PA · est. 1993
On July 15, 1864, an Erie Railroad train carrying more than 800 Confederate prisoners and their Union guards toward the prison camp at Elmira, New York, collided head-on with a coal train on the single-track line near Shohola. Dozens of men on both sides were killed in one of the deadliest railroad disasters of the Civil War era. The dead and wounded, prisoner and guard alike, were carried into the little village, whose residents cared for them without regard to which uniform they wore.
Delaware Cemetery Veterans Memorial
Delaware Township, PA
This memorial stands in the Delaware Cemetery near Dingman's Ferry, a Delaware River hamlet in Pennsylvania's Pike County that grew up around one of the region's early ferry crossings. It was raised in 1982 by American Legion Post No. 851 — part of the veterans' organization chartered by Congress in 1919 in the wake of World War I — whose posts are customarily named for local servicemen, here Tilghman, Angle, and Smith. Rather than marking a single battle or soldier, the stone deliberately gathers 'all veterans' under one dedication, the kind of collective remembrance found in small-town cemeteries across America.
John Summerfield Staples (1845-1888)
Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1999
By 1864 the Union relied on the draft to fill its armies, and even citizens exempt from service were urged to furnish substitute recruits. President Lincoln chose to lead by example, naming young John Summerfield Staples of Stroudsburg as his personal "representative recruit." After meeting the President at the White House on October 1, 1864, Staples served at Arlington, Virginia—one of fewer than 1,300 such symbolic enlistees.
Civil War Monument
City of Middletown, NY
Erected in 1879, this monument honors the soldiers of the Town of Wallkill who served in what its inscription calls 'The War of the Rebellion,' the Civil War of 1861–1865. Raised just over a decade after the war's end, it belongs to the great wave of memorial-building that swept Northern towns as the veteran generation aged. The Orange County community placed it to keep the memory of its Union soldiers before future generations.