SANGAMON TOWN IN 1831.
Drawn by J. McCan Davis with the aid of Mr. John E. Roll, a former resident.
JOHN E. ROLL.
Born in Green Village, New Jersey, June 4, 1814. He went to Illinois in 1830, the same year that Mr. Lincoln went, settling in Sangamon town, where he had relatives. It was here he met Lincoln, and made the "pins" for the flatboat. Later Mr. Roll went to Springfield, where he bought large quantities of land and built many houses. A quarter of the city is now known as "Roll's addition." Mr. Roll was well acquainted with Lincoln, and when the President left Springfield he gave Mr. Roll his dog, Fido. Mr. Roll knew Stephen A. Douglas well, and carries a watch which once belonged to the "Little Giant."
While he never attempted to conceal the poverty and hardship of these days, and would speak humorously of the "pretty pinching times" he saw, he never regarded his life at this time as mean or pitiable.
Frequently he talked to his friends in later years of his boyhood, and always with apparent pleasure. "Mr. Lincoln told this story" (of his youth), says Leonard Swett, "as the story of a happy childhood. There was nothing sad or pinched, and nothing of want, and no allusion to want in any part of it. His own description of his youth was that of a joyous, happy boyhood. It was told with mirth and glee, and illustrated by pointed anecdote, often interrupted by his jocund laugh."
And he was right. There was nothing ignoble or mean in this Indiana pioneer life. It was rude, but it was only the rudeness which the ambitious are willing to endure in order to push on to a better condition than they otherwise could know. These people did not accept their hardships apathetically. They did not regard them as permanent. They were only the temporary deprivations necessary in order to accomplish what they had come into the country to do. For this reason they could endure hopefully all that was hard. It is worth notice, too, that there was nothing belittling in their life, there was no pauperism, no shirking. Each family provided for its own simple wants, and had the conscious dignity which comes from being equal to a situation.