MOUNT PULASKI - If Abraham Lincoln had been born a bit later and lived long enough, the chances are his automobile of choice would have been a Pierce-Arrow.

Abe's early 20th-century successors certainly loved them, with William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt among the chief executives who waved at their fellow Americans from the sumptuous interiors of these top-of-the-line land yachts.

But if Lincoln was too early for the 1901-'38 Pierce-Arrow production run, it's never too late for Pierce-Arrow to go looking for Lincoln. "And we do expect to see him, he's going to be here," said Pierce-Arrow enthusiast Joanne Burmeister, as she stood by a 1929 model outside the Mount Pulaski Courthouse on Thursday and hoping for a glimpse of a Lincoln impersonator.

"And this is so nice," she said, looking at the courthouse where the circuit-riding lawyer practiced law from 1848 to 1853. "I want to see everything, it's beautiful."

A lot of the crowd gathering outside the courthouse wanted to see the amazing cars - dozens of them - and gaze at the strikingly attired Burmeister, dressed like a 1920s flapper in an ivory-cream number complete with matching headscarf. She and husband Nathan were in town from their California home for the Pierce-Arrow Society's Annual Meet, a club gathering featuring a parts swap, auction and car show with prizes. The meet is being hosted in Springfield this week with a tour of Honest Abe sites thrown in under the Looking for Lincoln theme.

The prairie lawyer was known for attracting an audience for his court cases in Mount Pulaski but it's doubtful his legal work drew the kind of appreciative crowd that lined up to gaze at the cars seeking him on Thursday. People snapped endless pictures, shot video of engine and interior details and kept asking Burmeister if she wouldn't mind standing a little closer to the 1929 sedan she'd arrived in.

"These are classic American cars," she said. "And you feel very grand riding in one. These cars were the American competition to Rolls-Royce, and a lot of them were owned by people that you would recognize."

Charlie Chaplin had one, as did John D. Rockefeller and the Shah of Persia and Babe Ruth and silent move star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and so on and so on. With rare models now worth up to $400,000, this was a car that was never intended as mass transit. John Gambs, a Pierce-Arrow enthusiast from Lafayette, Ind., said new ones cost $5,000 at a time when you might take home a brand new Model T home for $300 - but then came the Great Depression, and the luxury trade hit the wall.

"The same thing happened to Pierce-Arrow that happened to Peerless and Duesenberg and all the expensive, high-end cars," said Gambs, 60. "There just wasn't a market for them anymore; in their last year, 1938, they only made six of them."

The Pierce-Arrow Society has about 1,200 members who own maybe 2,300 cars, and Gambs says ownership is no fun if you don't have a good excuse to get out and drive.

"We like to look at new places when we have our annual meet," he said. "We wanted to come to Illinois to see the new Lincoln Museum and tour some of the Lincoln sites; it's a lot of fun."

Mount Pulaski was having a good time, too, with those who promote tourism pleased that the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum is doing what many had hoped it would - drawing tourists into the whole Central Illinois area.

"We want to bring more visitors to town, and the museum is working out well for us," said Jean Martin, a member of Mount Pulaski's Looking for Lincoln Committee. Surrounded by gleaming vehicles that made downtown appear like some exotic Hollywood stage set, Martin wore a grin as wide as a Pierce-Arrow bumper. "This is just great, I love it," she said. "We're just thrilled to death to have them here."

Tony Reid can be reached at treid@;herald-review.com or 421-7977.