The Illinois Historic Preservation Agency (IHPA) was created by State law in July 1985. What was the agency's oldest bureau, the
Illinois State Historical Library, was created in 1889, but the origins of the agency could be said to date back to the state's involvement in building and caring for the
Lincoln Tomb in Springfield, Illinois, in 1865. During the 20th century, the state of Illinois acquired and restored a wide variety of historic properties throughout the state. One key asset,
Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site in Menard County, a reconstruction of a village where Abraham Lincoln lived in the 1830s, was established in the 1930s. The agency also administers the
Cahokia World Heritage Site which includes the largest
pre-columbian construction in the Americas north of Mexico, having also acquired the site in the early 20th century for state protection. The IHPA continued to grow after its creation in 1985, largely because of continued public interest in Lincoln as the bicentennial of his birth approached in 2009. The
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum (ALPLM), also in Springfield, Illinois, was dedicated in 2005. Unlike most modern
presidential libraries, the Lincoln Library is state-owned. The proposed 2016 budget of Governor
Bruce Rauner sought to eliminate the agency, assigning its duties to the
Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Opponents of the move claimed that the Commerce Department had neither the expertise nor the interest to carry out the agency's functions and that any savings from the agency's 2015 budget of $15 million would be minimal. In 2017, the Agency was split, with the historic preservation and site management duties falling to a reorganized Division within the
Illinois Department of Natural Resources (which manages State Parks and other resources), and the Library (ALPLM) becoming an independent agency. ==List of Illinois State Historic Sites==