A Discovery—Documents of Historic Value—Lincoln Owned Land in Iowa—Copy of Letters Patent from United States, under James Buchanan, to Abraham Lincoln, in 1860—Copy of Deed Executed by Honorable Robert T. Lincoln and Wife, in 1892—Other Transfers—The Present Owner 100 CHAPTER XV. CELEBRATION OF THE CENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY OF LINCOLN'S BIRTH. Preparations—General Observance—President Roosevelt Lays Corner-stone of Lincoln Museum at Lincoln's Birthplace—Extracts from Addresses at Various Places—Closing Tribute 105 Footprints of Abraham Lincoln CHAPTER I. Lincoln's Birth and Early Life in Kentucky Unpromising Cradles—Site of the Log Cabin—Tangled History Untangled—Jacob S. Brother's Statement—Speaking with Authority—The Lincolns Move to Knob Creek—The Lincoln Farm Association. It has been said truly that God selects unpromising cradles for his greatest and best servants. On a cold winter night, a hundred years ago, in a floorless log cabin, the emancipator of a race was born. Like the Redeemer of mankind, there was "no room" in the mansions of the rich and the great for such a child to be born. Thomas Lincoln and Nancy Hanks, natives of Virginia, were married by Rev. Jesse Head, a minister of the Methodist Church, June 12, 1806, near Beechland, Washington County, Kentucky. They settled at Elizabethtown, Hardin County, where their first child, Sarah, was born, February 10, 1807. In 1808 they moved to a farm containing one hundred and ten acres, on the south fork of Nolin Creek, two miles south of Hodgenville, Hardin County, and fifty miles south of Louisville. Hodgenville afterward became, and is now the county-seat of Larue County, as that part of the territory now embraced in Larue County was set off from Hardin County in 1843. Here, on the twelfth of February, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born. The Hodgenville and Magnolia public highway runs through the farm. The site of the old log cabin in which Lincoln was born is about five hundred yards west of the road, and a short distance from the well-known "Rock Spring." The old Kirkpatrick mill, on Nolin Creek, is but a short distance away. The cabin, of course, is no longer in existence, although various publications have printed pictures of it, as though it were still standing on the original spot. Misleading statements have also been published that the original cabin has been placed on exhibition in various cities. Other publications, with more caution, have pictured it as the _alleged_ log cabin in which Lincoln was born.