The early life of Abraham Lincoln:: containing many unpublished documents and unpublished reminiscences of Lincoln's early friendsTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
The early life of Abraham Lincoln:: containing many unpublished documents and unpublished reminiscences of Lincoln's early friends
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
Lincoln, Abraham, 1809-1865 -- Childhood and youth
Thomas Lincoln moved into this cabin on the Big South Fork of Nolin
Creek, three miles from Hodgensville, in La Rue County, Kentucky, in
1808; and here, on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born. In
1813 the Lincolns removed to Knob Creek. The Nolin Creek farm has
been known as the “Creal Farm” for many years; recently it was
bought by New York people. The cabin was long ago torn down, but the
logs were saved. The new owners, in August, 1895, rebuilt the old
cabin on the original site. This, the first and only picture which
has been taken of it, was made for this biography.
]
Thomas Lincoln learned his trade as carpenter in Elizabethtown, in the
shop of one Joseph Hanks. There he met a niece of his employer, Nancy
Hanks, whom, when he was twenty-eight years old, he married. Nancy Hanks
was, like her husband, a Virginian. Her experience in life had, too,
been similar to her husband’s, for the Hanks family had been drawn into
Kentucky by the fascination of Boone, as had the Lincolns. But it was
only in her surroundings and her family that Nancy Hanks was like Thomas
Lincoln. In nature, in education, and in ambition she was, if tradition
is to be believed, quite another person. Certainly a fair and delicate
woman, who could read and write, who had ideas of refinement, and a
desire to get more from life than fortune had allotted her, was hardly
enough like Thomas Lincoln to be very happy with him. She was still more
unfit to be his wife because of a sensitive nature which made her brood
over her situation—a situation made the more hopeless by the fact that
she had neither the force of character nor strength of body to do
anything to improve it; if, indeed, she had any clear notion of what it
lacked. Hers was that pitiful condition where one feels with vague
restlessness that life has something better than one has found,
something not seen or understood, but without which life will never be
complete.
[Illustration:
THOMAS LINCOLN’S BIBLE.—NOW FIRST PUBLISHED.
From the original, in the collection of O. H. Oldroyd, Washington, D.
C. It is not known when or how Thomas Lincoln obtained this Bible.
After his death it passed to his step-children, the Johnstons, and
was sold by them to the “Lincoln Log Cabin Company,” to be exhibited
at the World’s Fair. It was purchased from this company for the
Oldroyd collection. The family record, reproduced on pages 58 and
59, belongs to this Bible. It was taken out and sold to Mr. C. F.
Gunther before the Bible was sold to Mr. Oldroyd.
]
[Illustration:
VIEW OF ROCK SPRING FARM, WHERE PRESIDENT LINCOLN WAS BORN.
From a photograph taken in September, 1895, for this biography. The
house in which Lincoln was born is seen to the right, in the
background. Rock Spring is in a hollow, under a clump of trees, in
the left centre of the picture.
]
[Illustration:
ROCK SPRING ON THE FARM WHERE LINCOLN WAS BORN.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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