I tell my brother to grab an empty Mountain Dew bottle from his truck so we can bring back some spring water. We’re at the Lincoln memorial. Not the one in Washington, the other one—the 344-acre Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park—an hour south of Louisville. This Lincoln memorial is older by a decade than the Henry Bacon-designed monument in Washington, but it gets only 250,000 visitors a year. The National Park Service estimates eight million people annually drop in on Daniel Chester French’s Lincoln sculpture overlooking the National Mall.

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