The village of New Salem, the scene of Lincoln’s mercantile career, was one of the many little towns which, in the pioneer days, sprang up along the Sangamon River, a stream then looked upon as navigable and as destined to be counted among the highways of commerce. Twenty miles northwest of Springfield, strung along the left bank of the Sangamon, parted by hollows and ravines, is a row of high hills. On one of these—a long, narrow ridge, beginning with a sharp and sloping point near the river, running south, and parallel with the stream a little way, and then, reaching its highest point, making a sudden turn to the west, and gradually widening until lost in the prairie—stood this frontier village. The crooked river for a short distance comes from the east, and, seemingly surprised at meeting the bluff, abruptly changes its course, and flows to the north. Across the river the bottom stretches out half a mile back to the highlands. New Salem, founded in 1829 by James Rutledge and John Cameron, and a dozen years later a deserted village, is rescued from oblivion only by the fact that Lincoln was once one of its inhabitants. His first sight of the town had been in April, 1831, when he and his crew had been detained in getting their flatboat over the Rutledge and Cameron mill-dam. When Lincoln walked into New Salem, three months later, he was not altogether a stranger, for the people remembered him as the ingenious flat-boatman who had freed his boat from water (and thus enabled it to get over the dam) by resorting to the miraculous expedient of boring a hole in the bottom.
William G. Greene was one of the earliest friends of Lincoln at New Salem. He stood on the bank of the Sangamon River on the 19th of April, 1831, and watched Lincoln bore a hole in the bottom of the flatboat which had lodged on the mill-dam, so that the water might run out. A few months later he and Lincoln were both employed by the enterprising Denton Offutt as clerks in the store and managers of the mill which had been leased by Offutt. It was William G. Greene who, returning home from college at Jacksonville on a vacation, brought Richard Yates with him, and introduced him to Lincoln, the latter being found stretched out on the cellar door of Bowling Green’s cabin, reading a book. Mr. Greene was born in Tennessee in 1812, and went to Illinois in 1822. After the disappearance of New Salem he removed to Tallula, a few miles away, where in after years he engaged in the banking business. He died in 1894, after amassing a fortune. ]