Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
History
Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4: A series of pen and pencil sketches of the lives of more than 200 of the most prominent personages in History
Biography
Abraham Lincoln, grandfather of the president, was born in Union, Pa.,
and in 1759 removed with his parents to a point near Harrisonburg, Va.
John Hanks and Squire Boone, father of Daniel Boone, were neighbors of
the Lincolns at Union; the former took up his residence at Harrisonburg,
Va., and Squire Boone removed to Holman's Ford, on the Yadkin River, in
North Carolina. When he was twenty-one years old, Abraham Lincoln went
to North Carolina to visit his old neighbors, the Boones, and while
there met and married Mary Shipley. He built a log cabin on the banks of
the Yadkin and lived there several years. Here it was that Thomas
Lincoln, father of the president, was born. Shortly after his birth his
parents, in 1778, removed to Kentucky and settled near Elizabethtown, in
Hardin County. In 1784, when Thomas was but six years old, his father
was killed by the Indians. There were no schools in that neighborhood,
and Thomas Lincoln grew to manhood without receiving an education.
Joseph Hanks, son of John Hanks, removed to Kentucky about the time that
Abraham Lincoln moved there from North Carolina. His daughter, Nancy
Hanks, who was born and educated in Virginia, grew up a playmate of
Thomas Lincoln, and in 1806 became his wife. Thomas Lincoln selected a
farm near Hodgensville, now the county seat of Larue County, Ky., built
a log cabin containing but one room, in which, on February 12, 1809,
Abraham Lincoln, the future president, was born. A poor farmer, with no
education and no capital other than his labor, Thomas Lincoln found
little to encourage his stay in Kentucky. The institution of slavery,
which lived on the toil of the black man, threw a dark shadow across the
path of the "poor white" who could claim no title to property in human
flesh and sinew, and in 1817 he removed from Kentucky to Spencer County,
Ind., and settled in the forest at Pigeon Creek, near the town of
Gentryville. On October 5, 1818, Mrs. Lincoln died and was laid to rest
at the foot of a tree on the farm which her husband had hewed out of the
forest with his axe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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