Land of Young Lincoln

Lambs at the replica Lincoln farm

Crossing the Ohio River again, I traversed a fresh road, a highway through the hilly Kentucky wilderness ending in a new bridge and a nuclear power plant in Indiana. Another 30 miles of scrubby road led to an interesting crossroads – one direction leads to Santa Claus and Holiday World, the other goes toward lands crucial to our greatest president.

Illinois claims the mantle of Land of Lincoln, and rightly so – he was an Illinois Congressman, worked there as a lawyer and owned a house in Springfield. But his childhood was split between Kentucky and Indiana as Thomas Lincoln moved repeatedly due to land claims. He would actually spend more time in Indiana than in Kentucky before the Lincolns' move to Illinois.

The Lincoln Boyhood Home National Memorial has a special significance for the 16th president. At their cabin, his mother died when he was only nine.

Bronze cast of original cabin site and hearth

It could be easy to shrug off another Lincoln tribute. They could be considered overdone. But few presidents had childhoods like Lincoln. I have visited his birthplace, his childhood home, the spot where he entered Illinois, the theater where he was shot and the room where he died. They all have their own vibrancy. I especially enjoy the recreations of his birthplace and cabins where they lived – we have no concept of the tiny spaces where frontier farming families eked through winter or worked fields during summer heat.

Nancy Lincoln hall

Indiana funded construction of a stone memorial with halls at each end of the U-shaped memorial honoring Lincoln and his mother. Both smelled of rich woods. A new rug in the Nancy Lincoln hall replaced one that filled the floor for 70-plus years. The Abraham Lincoln hall was more akin to a church, quiet and spiritual (odd for a president not known for espousing his religion, but a neat space nonetheless).

On the outside walls, five bas-reliefs chronicle his life and death, with famous quotes from Lincoln and those close to him. The place had a solemnity, as people grew quiet when observing the bas-reliefs. Inside the corridors were quiet. Edwin Stanton’s “Now he belongs to the ages” is among those in stone, as well as the president’s prescient quote about the ballot being stronger than the bullet.

Hot as the day was, I had a quick picnic in the tall trees outside the memorial, then wandered into the woods to see the Lincoln sites. The president’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln, died of milk sickness here. The Lincoln’s cows ate snakeroot, not poisonous to them, but something it could pass to humans through milk. Nancy Lincoln was among the multitudes to die from the illness. In a quiet cemetery of pioneer stones, one marks the grave of Nancy Lincoln.

After Nancy died, Thomas Lincoln remarried a year later to a Kentucky widow with three children he was acquainted with. However quickly Thomas remarried, Lincoln developed as strong relationship with his step-mother. 

Grazing away

Along with a bronze outline of the original farm site and a replica of the fireplace stones, the memorial includes a period-appropriate farm with crops and animals the Lincolns would have raised.

This farm was far different than the vintage farm from a few weeks earlier in South Carolina. The vintage cabin, while not a cabin in which the Lincolns resided, was from the same era and moved to the site from elsewhere in Indiana. It’s also scaled down from the original 160 acres to just four acres, with several fields of crops and pastures for cows and sheep. Several chickens of an heirloom breed paraded around their wooden coop. As I approached, they made low warning clucks to tell each other they were no longer alone.

 The shaggy sheep were the clear superstars of this farm. Grazing vigorously, the herd march through their pen. They were shaved once a year, and most were due, their wool coated in mud from the wet spring. In the pen, two lambs pranced, chewing downed branches and exploring the pasture. One was a month old, the other three weeks. Occasionally they sidled up to their mothers for milk.

But the little ones were not comfortable with humans, at least this visitor. The mature sheep ignored visitors but the lambs regarded me with suspicion as I stood outside the pen with my camera. I had to rely on the long lens to catch any pictures; they bounded away anytime I crept too close.

Bernie's annual shave

Only one sheep was outside the pen, and he was tethered to a fence in the yard. Bernie, the father of both lambs romping in the sheep pen, was receiving a shearing with vintage clippers. A ranger dressed in period farmer’s clothes chatted up visitors while working to shear Bernie. Woolen curls dangled above his eyes.

The massive sheep registered his disapproval repeatedly, both in fighting the shears and with the occasional bellow. With the temperatures hitting the low 90s, Bernie fought against his shearer, tongue panting like a dog. The ranger had removed all the easy fur and now worked on the tail, legs and head, and Bernie had no plans to cooperate. This ranger knew how to handle him and gave Bernie ample breaks between shearing sessions.

The farm also included a cow who was born on the same farm as George Washington, although the farm ranger reminded us that the cow was born centuries later. Some people, he said, wondered who was born first. The rest of the sheep herd grazed as if the heat did not affect them. The lambs bounced around, finding new attractions in fallen branches and the split-rail fences anytime I tried to move close. No matter the angel, they traipsed out of view, using the split-rails and tree trunks to play and romp.

Traveling solo sometimes allows the role of passive voyeur. I wound up walking behind a family from Fort Wayne, and listened to them discussing the memorial and the farm. One woman noted the snakeroot plant as they passed, noting how it was nothing to us and it killed Nancy Lincoln and many other farmers in those days. I could not have picked out snakeroot among the plants sprouting along the trails.

Cabin replica

Across the street from the national memorial, more Lincoln connections lie in the larger Lincoln State Park. Lincoln’s sister, Sara Lincoln Grisby, who died in childbirth in 1828, is buried with her infant at the Little Pigeon Baptist Church’s cemetery, along with her husband Aaron Grisby. The state park includes numerous historic buildings and miles of trails. I didn’t venture into the state park, not having known it existed. Knowing there is a whole other patch of Lincoln history to explore gives me reason to revisit this plot of southern Indiana.

Aside from George Washington, mo president has been venerated in the same way as Lincoln across geography important to them. Theodore Roosevelt claims a good piece of National Park Service real estate, but he had a ranch in North Dakota and an unexpected inauguration in Buffalo, N.Y. Few had the subsistence farmer life of Lincoln's youth, where farm labor and lack of facilities limited his schooling. His step-mother’s many books filled in gaps.

 Here in 2018, the May heat pounded, spring skipped again as winter jumped into summer. I could return to the air-conditioned memorial for a film about the life of the Lincoln family the 1810s and 1820s, but I didn’t feel I needed to. Walking in the heat and observing the bustle of the restored farm connected me with the life of the young emancipator better than anything else.

The memorial

One more lamb pic for the road