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Lincoln fans go for record by reciting speech

(via Jenna Dooley, WUIS)

Winter hats mingled with stovepipe hats at the center of a nationwide effort to honor Abraham Lincoln and set a world record.

Hundreds of people gathered Friday in Springfield to recite the speech Lincoln gave when he left for the White House. At the same time, people across the country read the speech in hope of setting a new mark for the most people to read a document aloud simultaneously.

Lincoln delivered his heartfelt goodbye exactly 150 years ago.

The Guinness Book of World Records requires the reading to last five minutes, so the crowd had to recite the brief speech three times.

Organizers say it will be several weeks before they know if they broke the record, set when 223,363 people read "Charlotte's Web" aloud in 2006.