LINCOLN - If Abraham Lincoln had been there, he would have loved the sound.

Old-time music expert Dale Evans sat in the grounds of the Postville Courthouse state historic site in Lincoln on Sunday, picking tunes "claw hammer" style on a five-string banjo.

The occasion was the 1800s Craft Fair, an event designed to show visitors the products, sights and sounds of the 1840s period when Lincoln, a circuit riding lawyer, was a familiar courthouse visitor.

Claw hammer takes it name from the crooked fingers of the player that produce a distinctive sound the 16th president was known to have heard and liked. "There is a story that Lincoln wanted his son Robert to learn to play it," said Evans, but no evidence his eldest boy ever did.

Evans, however, was more than happy to step back in time and do the honors for craft fair onlookers, who sat listening on make-shift seating consisting of hay bales hauled to a shady spot. Evans, who lives in Bloomington and builds many of the instruments he played, also made music on hammered dulcimers and a bizarre-looking stringed instrument with hand-pressed keys called a "nyckelharpa," which originated in Sweden.

"But as Lincoln was riding around the circuit, if he heard any music, the chances are it would be a fiddle, a banjo and maybe the dulcimer," said Evans.

Filling in some of the other 19th-century audio and visual effects were displays of everything from blacksmithing to weaving and even candle-dipping among dozens of other period attractions in the shadow of the courthouse. The building itself, surprisingly, is not a genuine Lincoln artifact but an exact copy, built in 1953, after Henry Ford's Greenfield Village museum had bought the original in 1929 and hauled it off to Michigan.

Step inside, however, and visitors meet a genuine Lincoln artifact Ford would have died for - a beautifully made rocking chair. It came from the home of Illinois State Sen. Malden Jones, where Lincoln was a frequent house guest while riding the circuit, and Honest Abe just loved to rest his weary bones in that very chair.

The rocker was a gift from the senator's great-great grandson and has been on display since being received last year. Shirley Bartelmay, who coordinates the volunteers who man the courthouse, says it's a tangible link with a man who's become legend. "And we're very, very proud of it," she added.

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