The dean of all Abraham Lincoln scholars passed away on March 31, 2025. He was 101. Wayne Calhoun Temple, known to everyone as “Doc,” celebrated his 101st birthday on February 5th.
Temple was an internationally recognized authority on Abraham Lincoln. He was the Chief Deputy Director of the Illinois State Archives for decades. After serving under Eisenhower in Europe during World War II and receiving an undergraduate degree in engineering, Temple began his career as a historian working as a research assistant under the renowned professor J.G. Randall, then earning master’s and Ph.D. degrees under the direction of Randall and then Richard R. Current. Over the years he was a prolific writer and received many awards, including the “Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial edition of the Order of Lincoln.” He was Editor-in-Chief of the Lincoln Herald, Secretary-Treasurer of the National Lincoln-Civil War Council, on Memorial Bibliography committee for Lincoln Lore, and many other service positions. Temple also was a guest on a Lincoln Documentary produced by PBS and a member of the U.S. Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s Advisory Committee to mark the 200th Anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in 2009.
Among his many books are Abraham Lincoln: From Skeptic to Prophet, Lincoln’s Connections with the Illinois-Michigan Canal, Lincoln’s Surgeons at His Assassination, Lincoln’s Travels on the River Queen, and Lincoln’s Confidant: The Life of Noah Brooks.
Those of us in the Lincoln Group of DC who took the tour out to Illinois in 2016 got to meet Wayne Temple in person. He and the late Dick Hart told us stories of their long careers in Lincoln scholarship. I had the privilege of being at his table for dinner and having a long discussion about Lincoln’s connections with the Illinois & Michigan Canal, which I talked about in my own book on Lincoln’s interests in science and technology. Temple was 92 years old at the time and only recently retired from the Illinois State Archives. That’s him and his wife from 2016 in the photo above.
Wayne Temple was the impetus for the Lincoln Day-by-Day project in 1959, which the Lincoln Group of DC helped bring to fruition. In fact, Wayne said he was incredibly proud to have worked with us and acknowledged that Day-by-Day never would have happened without the LGDC. He further suggested that there are plenty of gaps that perhaps we could work to fill in even today.
No doubt much will be said in the next few days as Lincoln scholars and aficionados recount their memories of “the dean,” “Doc” Wayne Temple. I know I will as I recently wrote about my own interactions with him as part of my forthcoming book. He will be missed.
[Photo credit: David J. Kent, taken in 2016 in Springfield, IL]
Coming in February 2026: Unable to Escape This Toil
Available now – Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America is available at booksellers nationwide.
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David J. Kent is President of the Lincoln Group of DC and the author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America and Lincoln: The Man Who Saved America.
His previous books include Tesla: The Wizard of Electricity and Edison: The Inventor of the Modern World and two specialty e-books: Nikola Tesla: Renewable Energy Ahead of Its Time and Abraham Lincoln and Nikola Tesla: Connected by Fate.
