Beginning Monday, there will be no fees charged to visit the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in Indiana/NPS

Is $10 too much to pay to learn about the boyhood of perhaps America's best president? That might be the case at Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial, where the superintendent has suspended the park's entrance fee with hopes of attracting more visitors.

Located a handful of miles south of Interstate 64 in southwestern Indiana, the memorial encompasses the farm where Abraham Lincoln spent 14 years growing up.

The re-created pioneer homestead is located on the actual site of the Lincoln family farm, and includes a cabin, outbuildings, split rail fences, farm animals, vegetable and herb gardens and field crops. Rangers in period clothing perform a variety of activities typical of the 1820 era. The farm does not retain any of the original structures from Lincoln's time but was built in an attempt to depict a typical farm of his period in Indiana. It incorporates some of what is known of the Lincoln farm and activities which were a common part of the Lincoln family's daily life.

As contributing writer Jim Burnett noted in a 2009 Traveler article, "here's the land where Abe and his siblings did their lessons by the dim light of a fire, after a long day of chores. Here's the very spot he learned to split rails—and a host of other tasks that were part of carving a farm out of the wilderness. The future president also experienced sadness in this place—his mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died here in 1818—and the nine-year-old boy helped make her crude wooden coffin."

Her final resting place is located in the present park.

Is that rich history not enough to prompt visitors to pay $5 per person, or $10 for a family, or just $20 for an annual pass that allows entrance for 365 days? Apparently not.

So, on January 1, the entrance fees will disappear. In a release announcing the move, the park staff said, "It is hoped that this move will encourage more citizens to visit the park and learn about the boyhood of Abraham Lincoln."

Superintendent Kendell Thompson added that, "(M)aking the park more accessible to all people seems a most appropriate way to carry on the NPS tradition, and we look forward to serving even greater numbers of visitors in the future.”

While visitation to the national memorial approached 250,000 in 1977, it dropped to just under 100,000 in 2014 before rebounding to 125,562 in 2016, the Park Service's centennnial year.

At a time when Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is pushing a scheme to use surge pricing at 17 prominent national parks to raise funds to help address the National Park Service's estimated $11.3 billion maintenance backlog, there are a number of parks that have abandoned entrance fees because they cost more to collect than they return or, in the case of Lincoln Boyhood Memorial, are viewed as an impediment to visitation, period.

It was three years ago that Fort Laramie National Historic Site in Wyoming dropped its entrance fees.

“When I reviewed the numbers, I noticed trends clearly indicating that entrance fees at Fort Laramie don’t make sense anymore. After conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis, we determined it is in the best interest of both the park and the public to eliminate our entrance fee," Superintendent Tom Baker said at the time. "We will be able to free up staff time that has been spent performing fee collection duties, and redirect employees’ time and talents back to one of the core missions of the National Park Service—that of providing excellent visitor services. With the elimination of fees, we look forward to increased visits from our immediate neighbors, along with friends, relatives, and house guests."

Fort Union National Monument in New Mexico also dropped its entrance fees about the same time.

Just 118 of the 417 units of the National Park System charge entrance fees. That will drop to 117 on Monday. Under the present fee guidelines, 80 percent of the fees collected in a park stay within that park, while 20 percent is sent to Washington, D.C., to be redistributed to other needy parks.

If those 117 parks are going to increasingly be counted on to provide dollars to address maintenance needs across the park system, will Interior call for even higher fees? 

The strain on parks was increased a month ago when Secretary Zinke took $33 million, or roughly one quarter of the annual total, from the Park Service's construction account to pay for repairs to the Arlington Memorial Bridge in Washington. That borrowing will lead to delays in construction projects in parks across the system, though the Park Service has not publicly identified which will be put off.

But recent news has pointed to the need to replace a failing, 58-year-old sewer system at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa, and Grand Canyon National Park officials continue to be tormented by the decrepit transcanyon pipeline.