The Minister and the One-Legged Pig

uring my many years as an “1840s farmer” at a living history site in central Illinois, I was tasked with engaging the public in dialogue. The goal was to demonstrate how people lived on the prairie at the time when Abraham Lincoln was practicing law in the state capitol. In fact, our site was a “first-person” site. That meant, we all acted as though we were living in 1845. At times, this simply confused our audience, so I would get their attention with a story about “The minister