Visitors from all over the world come to Washington D.C. to visit its monuments and memorials. These towering marble structures stand as testaments to our nation’s wisest leaders and bravest heroes. It seems unimaginable then that one of the most coveted monuments contained a typo.
Which one? The one commemorating our 16th President, Abraham Lincoln.
The Lincoln Memorial was formally dedicated on May 30, 1922. This marble behemoth measures 190 feet long, 120 feet wide and 99 feet tall. It has been the site of many important and symbolic gatherings and events, perhaps most notably Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963.
Chiseled onto one of the marble stone walls, is President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address delivered on March 4, 1865, soon after the Emancipation Proclamation was passed. In that speech, the President expressed his “High Hope for the Future” as the country had just emerged from a brutal and bloody civil war. Inexplicably, the carver originally misspelled the word “future” and the line read as “High Hope for the Euture.” Eventually the mistake was corrected, filled in with stone to hide the lower horizontal line making the “E.”
Even today, the Lincoln Memorial remains the most visited of all the memorials with over six million visitors every year.
