The Carl Sandburg State Historic Site preserves the modest three-room cottage on East Third Street where the poet, biographer, and folk singer was born in 1878. Sandburg is best known for his multi-volume biography of Lincoln, his free-verse poetry celebrating working-class America, and the poetry collection "Chicago Poems," which opens with the famous lines calling Chicago "Hog Butcher for the World."
The site museum traces his life and work with exhibits on his journalism, his time collecting folk songs, and his years on a goat farm in Michigan where he wrote the Lincoln biography. Behind the cottage, a small park contains the granite boulder under which his ashes — and those of his wife Lilian — were interred. It is a quietly moving place.