Back twenty years to... Friday, August 4th, 2006. Day 118. The small town and the Courthouse where Abraham Lincoln cut his litigious teeth. A College Town named 'Normal', and an eclectic selection of partially preserved remnants along 'Old Route 66'.

"On now to Mount Pulaski – my Illinois 'target town' – turning-off from State Highway 54 on County Road 121. The place turns out to be something special. With the temperature now dropped, and a fresh breeze cooling things down, I first take a walk south, over the railroad tracks, for pictures of the homes and smaller businesses, many emblazoned with multiple variations of red-white-and-blue flags and rosettes. A rightfully patriotic display.

Right in the centre of town is the 'Mount Pulaski Courthouse State Historic Site'. The modestly sized building stands in the middle of a neatly mown lawn, and it's where Abraham Lincoln once practised law, some years before he was elected as the Nation's sixteenth President in 1861. Of course he's credited as the man who abolished black slavery in the US, issuing the 'Emancipation Proclamation' in 1863. Before his assassination in 1865, he led the 'Unionist' northern States to victory over the southern 'Confederacy', in the years of the American Civil War.

Soon after walking into the Courthouse, I almost wish I hadn’t. The exceptionally lovely, but client-starved, lady curator wants to give me the whole, full-on guided tour. I tell her that I’m short on time, and would just like to get some pictures. But this passes her by, and as I take a step towards the first tableau – as if her, 'Activate Tour' mechanism has been triggered by the motion – she starts-in on a well rehearsed discourse.

Outside, I check my pictures on the camera-back. On the wall of the courtroom there's a US flag with thirty stars on it. I know that – as each State consolidated, ratified the Constitution and joined the Union – there were many evolving new versions of the blue canton in the good-ol' 'stars-and-bars'. The one I'm seeing here was redesigned, with the inclusion of Wisconsin, which joined the Union on May 29th, 1848, thereby adding the thirtieth star."

In Search of Small-Town America: Volume 1 is a free-of-charge Pdf digital download – available from our shop. A table of contents, the introduction, the route-map – and featuring content on the first two States travelled: New Mexico and Arizona.

Jeremy Hammond I am a British writer and photographer, and have travelled through India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia, but most extensively in North America. In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked as lighting crew, and later designer, for many top-named British bands, on tours through Europe, Japan, and the USA. I’ve worked as a cruise-ship photographer, in office and store design, database design, visual arts book publishing and as a London-based freelance photographer, specialising in interiors and architecture.