"This region is where Abraham Lincoln spent more of his time than anywhere else in his life."
The man who said that doesn't live here. Sameer Somal is a Pennsylvania resident, a testifying expert witness, and by his own account a fairly recent convert to Lincoln scholarship. Over the past year he has become one of the more visible people in Athens without ever moving here, and if you've noticed more cars outside the Col. Matthew Rogers Building on a Tuesday afternoon, or heard your neighbor mention a hog roast that wasn't the usual church fundraiser, he's the reason.
The short version, reported by Illinois Times this month, is that Somal joined the board of the Abraham Lincoln Long Nine Museum, brought a group of outside investors through town to meet with city leaders, and has started talking about turning vacant Main Street property into something built around Lincoln's legacy. The longer version is more useful if you actually live in Athens and want to know whether this is a passing curiosity or the start of something that changes how the town's most historic building gets used.
The Phone Call That Started It
Somal's connection to Lincoln didn't start with real estate or with Athens. It started with a cold call. Years ago, when he was building his consulting firm, Blue Ocean Global Technology, he cold-called attorney and public relations executive Richard Levick. That call turned into a business partnership, which pulled Somal into the world of expert witness testimony. Over roughly a decade, he has consulted on more than 500 legal cases, most of them involving the value of reputation, intellectual property, or defamation claims. Spending that much time thinking about reputation and legacy, by his own telling, is what deepened his interest in the most famous lawyer in American history.
That interest eventually reached Athens because of a phone call in the other direction. Long Nine Museum board president Joe McMenamin, an attorney and former Springfield City Council member, said he got a call in 2025 from a Lincoln scholar in Philadelphia. He and longtime board member Guy Fraker talked it over and decided the museum needed younger energy on its board. In October 2025, the museum announced two new board members: Athens Mayor Chris Reichert and Sameer Somal.
"Given my reverence for Mr. Lincoln, it's simply a privilege to join the board," Somal said at the time.
What's Actually Different Since Then
A board appointment on its own wouldn't be worth writing about. What makes this year different is the pace of what's followed it.
In February, the museum held a reception marking Lincoln's 217th birthday and honoring Guy Fraker for his years of service. On August 1, the museum hosted its first History and Hog Roast, an event that brought food, live music, and a room full of speakers to Athens, including former USPTO head Jon Dudas, Lincoln presenter Randy Duncan, and Athens Chief of Police Ben Harmening. Mayor Reichert used the occasion to describe the past year as a deliberate push, saying he and McMenamin had been figuring out how to get more people to Athens and aware of what the museum has to offer.
Then there's the collection. Somal, along with history enthusiast Anthony Cichetti, purchased the Alfred Orendorff Archive, a set of materials from Lincoln's legal career that includes:
- Lincoln's original deed for his first land purchase in New Salem, signed by a secretary in the Van Buren administration
- A fee book Lincoln signed multiple times while practicing law with John T. Stuart
- Affidavits from the McLean County vs. Illinois Central Railroad case
- Eight pages of notes from Lincoln's 1858 Senate campaign against Stephen A. Douglas
- The desk from the Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices on which Lincoln wrote his "House Divided" speech
That's not a collection someone assembles for a hobby. It's the kind of acquisition that changes what a small museum's board starts thinking is possible, and it's part of why Somal recently brought a group of investors to Athens to meet with city leaders and see the town firsthand. He has also since been named to the board of the Abraham Lincoln Association, a national Lincoln scholarship organization founded in 1908, alongside Dr. Cecily Zander of the University of Wyoming.
What The Museum Actually Commemorates
If you grew up in Athens, you probably already know the basics of what the Long Nine Museum is about, but the details are worth restating because they're the reason any of this national attention is landing here instead of somewhere else.
The museum sits in the Col. Matthew Rogers Building at 200 S. Main St., built around 1831 to 1832 to house Rogers' general store and the town post office. During the 1830s, a young Abraham Lincoln, then postmaster of nearby New Salem, regularly visited that post office to collect mail. On August 3, 1837, roughly 100 people gathered on the building's second floor for a banquet honoring Lincoln and eight fellow state legislators, all of them notably tall, for a legislative win that had just secured the votes to move Illinois' state capital from Vandalia to Springfield. That group became known as the Long Nine. Restoration of the building began in 1972, and Athens native John Eden purchased and reopened it as a museum in the late 1980s, running it for decades. During the summer season, it's open Tuesday through Saturday afternoons.
It's a small museum with a genuinely significant story, and for most of its history that story has been told mainly to the people who already knew to look for it. What's changed in the past year isn't the history. It's who's paying attention to it.
Why This Particular Story Is Worth Watching
The Long Nine's own history is essentially a case study in relationship building over institutional muscle. Nine tall legislators from a bigger, more powerful county talked their way into moving the entire seat of state government, not through leverage but through persistence and personal connection. The way Somal has worked his way onto that same museum's board, and then onto a national Lincoln organization's board, follows a similar pattern. A cold call led to a career. A different call led to a board seat. A board seat led to an artifact purchase, then to an investor tour, then to a seat on a 118-year-old national institution. None of it happened through a grant application or a press release campaign. It happened because a handful of people, mostly volunteers, decided to make room for someone new and let the results compound.
For Athens, that's the part worth paying attention to over the next year, more than any single event on the calendar. If Somal's talk about vacant Main Street property turns into something concrete, it will be worth knowing who's driving it and why, and residents who've followed the story from the cold call forward will have a much better read on what's happening than anyone reading about it for the first time.
Keeping an Eye on Main Street
None of this changes what Athens is on a Tuesday afternoon. It's still a town of under 2,000 people, nine miles southeast of Petersburg, where the museum keeps summer hours and the biggest annual gathering used to be the Fourth of July fireworks at Athens Community Park. What's changed is that a 190-year-old building on Main Street now has a national spotlight pointed at it, brought there by a volunteer board's decision to answer one unexpected phone call.
Land & Home Real Estate has spent years working in towns like Athens, where the interesting stories often start with a building most people pass without a second look. If you're curious about what a stretch of Main Street attention like this eventually means for property in Menard County, or you just want to talk through what's happening around town, Land & Home Real Estate is a good place to start that conversation. Request a property valuation whenever you're ready, no history lecture required.
