Construction set:Original Lincoln Logs Construction Set No. 2-FL

John L. Wright, son of the well-known 20th-century architect Frank. Lloyd Wright, named his construction set after America's 16th president. John Wright claimed he got the idea for Lincoln Logs from the "floating cantilever construction" techniques his father developed for Tokyo's Imperial Hotel. Lincoln Logs appeared in stores in 1920, just as Americans began to worry that urbanization and industrialization would harm the nation's character and values. At that time, the country adapted symbols of the wilderness and frontier into everyday life even as the frontier itself "closed." Children joined Boy Scouts and Camp Fire Girls to learn wood crafts, natural history, and living in the wild. National parks preserved vast tracts of wilderness for Americans to visit and explore. Americans had long associated the log cabin and frontier spirit with democratic principles, and they found progress in having tamed the wilderness and cultivated its lands. Abraham Lincoln, who was born in a simple log cabin and rose to be president of the United States, not only epitomized the virtues of the frontier but also proved that, uniquely, in America individuals of the humblest beginnings could achieve greatness. The name John Wright chose for his construction set reflected the sentiments of the times, but Lincoln Logs have remained popular for 100 years.

Even in the 1950s, when the log cabin had long disappeared from the American landscape, Lincoln Logs advertised its construction set with a look at America's past. "Whoever Knows the History the Log Cabin, Knows the History and the Spirit of the American People," it insisted. And though the construction set was no longer illustrated with the simple log cabin of Abraham Lincoln's day, it, of course, still bore the image of log structures common to midcentury movies and TV shows of cowboys and Indians.