HippoPress -- The Hippo -- Guide to Manchester and Nashua NH

Retired for three years from a career as a forestry educator at UNH, Steve Wood now makes a living of playing Abraham Lincoln. He’s member number 118 of the nationwide Association of Lincoln Presenters, the only member in New Hampshire. Wood specializes in anecdotes about Lincoln’s travels to New England, especially his stops in Concord, Manchester, Exeter and Dover, N.H. He stays in character until the end of his presentations, when he speaks about Lincoln’s life and entertains questions. He appears at the Brookline Public Library at 7 p.m. Feb. 8 and the Amherst Town Library at 7 p.m. Feb. 13.

Q:How did you start portraying Lincoln?
In 1994, friends of ours, living in Claremont at the time, had just recently seen the televised versions of re-enactments of each of the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates ... They got inspired to do an edited version of one of those debates as a local library fundraiser. [The wife] had her husband portray Douglas but needed a Lincoln, and so she actually put notice in the paper for auditions for this particular role. As it turned out, there was only one other fellow who showed up to audition for this part. ... [My wfe] and I both have been active in community theater ... Some people might say when they see me, well sure, you look like the guy. Yeah, but I didn’t at the time, because I had a beard, yes, but it’s a little bit longer and I also had a big, full handlebar mustache.

Had anyone ever told you you looked like Lincoln before [you shaved the mustache]?
No, because I never really had the facial hair arrangement. That makes a big difference.

Although, isn’t it true that Lincoln didn’t have the beard for most of his presidency?
He didn’t start growing it until apparently just after he was elected as President for the first time. So no, he didn’t look like that for most of his life.

Does your wife get into the act too?
She does on occasion. She sometimes accompanies me as Mary Todd Lincoln, and she’s done quite a bit of reading and research on her, about Lincoln’s wife, and she can do a pretty creditable job as Mary Todd Lincoln, but that’s not her favorite character, she does several. She’s much more versatile than I am.

Well, you can’t really just shave the beard off and have it grow back in time.
Not really, no. I don’t want to have to try to paste a fake one on to look like Lincoln again.

What is it about Lincoln that you find interesting?
He almost seems too good to be true. When you read about his character, how he interacted with people ... he’s been built up to something almost of a mythological character as far as what he was able to accomplish. Really, the old cliché, being the right person for the right job — the right place at the right time. ... It’s fairly well known, I guess, that his wife suffered from depression, but Lincoln did too. It’s just that he was essentially able to deal with his depression a lot more successfully than his wife was with hers. He really did practice what he believed, and he was very shrewd.

Have you found yourself trying to learn more about that period in history?
I have learned more by virtue of giving talks. What I try to do is to tailor talks that I do give specifically to the audience, so that if, for example, in talking to historical societies, what I’ll normally try to do is to find the names the men who served from that town and specifically those who didn’t return, and then just recite their names near the end of my talk, usually before I deliver the Gettysburg Address, just as a tribute to them. I think most people are really surprised at the numbers — at just how many men not only served, but the numbers who died in the Civil War from their town.

Well, the Civil War was a particularly bloody war, not only for the time, but even now.
And the percentage of men who served, especially from a lot of these smaller towns, was just amazing. Just the sheer numbers of men who were involved in that conflict, and the death rates — in most instances, a lot higher from diseases than from battlefield injuries.

Because they were away from home in non-sanitary conditions, that sort of thing?
Yeah, and medical science, surprisingly, in some areas at least, had not advanced much at all by the time of the Civil War. It did evolve quite a bit as a result of the war, but still, there were a lot of unknowns. ... There was one particular regiment from New Hampshire that went to serve in Louisiana up along the Mississippi River north of New Orleans, and they just dropped like flies from malaria and in some cases typhoid fever. It was just so rampant down there.

— John "jaQ" Andrews