Please Don't Quote Me By Caralee Aschenbrenner He was an ordinary sort of fellow whose name appears in wilderness days only on the usual tax lists, jury and road petitions and as a sometime guard for county prisoners. Otherwise you'd never have heard of him among the earliest of pioneers. Especially because, too, he moved. Many times in the course of his life as many did then. His birth occurred in Rockingham County, Virginia and when as a child of about two, the family made their way westward into Kentucky. There, in 1786 his father was killed in an Indian attack. By the time he was nineteen, the boy, now a hardened young man of compact build, was working as a hired man for his uncle, Isaac, in Tennessee.

There was nothing unique about him it is supposed. He stood around five feet nine inches and weighed about 190 pounds. Images of him show a somewhat square face, hair receding a bit in his older age; his hair was coarse and black. His mouth was wide beneath dark hazel eyes. A frontiersman like hundreds of others.

One description said he had an "inoffensive personality" which adds to the fact that nobody would have heard of him had not the Fates determined otherwise. It was rumored though that he was a respectably able carpenter, a trade he plied besides farming. He was known to make cabinets, door and window frames and coffins. He might have kept busy as a carpenter because all building/housing then was new on the various frontiers! Tom added his part to settlement by buying up 238 acres by the next year following a move to Hardin County, Kentucky in 1802.

While like many then, Tom couldn't read or write or did he understand why anyone would want to. It was a sticking point with him. It's certainly a puzzle how he could have attracted two extraordinary women in his two marriages. But, obviously he had some sort of charm despite a seeming ordinariness. He was popular with his neighbors, it was said, and "temperate in his drinking habits."

Though he couldn't read, he reportedly was a good storyteller which may answer question how he was able to find a capable wife two times!

Nancy was the name of the first, but not a whole lot is known of her childhood because nothing is known of her father. A son later told an associate that her father had been a "well-bred planter or farmer."

Nancy's mother was Lucy who had given birth to the girl, February 5, 1784 in Hampshire County, now West Virginia, in a cabin on "Mike's Run" at the foot of "New Creek Mountain," only one of the colorful names in this story and well-suited to a movie script or sites in a novel!

Added to Nancy's story is that her mother took her along the Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap, two historical landmarks in American history. In Kentucky the mother, Lucy, married Henry Sparrow and Nancy went to live with Lucy's sister, Elizabeth, who was married to Henry's brother (her mother's new husband) who was Thomas Sparrow. Eventually Nancy Hanks became known as Nancy Sparrow and Aunt Elizabeth became like a mother to her.

Nancy was somewhat exceptional ... Cheerful, neat and intelligent and became well-known for her sewing abilities ... As a seamstress and needleworker. She was on-call in three counties because of her talents and character. She'd live-in with a family while completing the projects had for her ... Wedding dresses, entire wardrobes, funeral attire everything fabric and thread. Her cousin, John Hanks, described her as about five feet seven inches weighing 120 pounds with dark hair and hazel eyes, certainly a pretty, accomplished package in any time period.

Perhaps it was that gift of story telling that attracted her to Tom Lincoln and prompted a romance to develop. No one seems to know the back story but they were married in June of 1806, joined by the Rev. Jesse Head. The couple moved into a cabin at Elizabethtown, Kentucky where they entered a membership in the Little Mount Separate Baptist Church. Nancy being "deeply religious" welcomed the church nearby; the church which had split from the "regular" church because of the slavery issue. Reference doesn't say which way the Mount Separate Church bent!

In February of 1807 a daughter, Sarah, was born to the Lincoln's. A short while later they moved to "Sinking Spring Farm" near Hogenville, Kentucky where on an early Sunday morning near dawn, February 12, 1809, a baby boy was born. It was a very stormy day. The baby squalled, too. There was a pole bed with corn husk mattresses. A twenty year-old neighbor girl, Peggy Waters, served as mid-wife. She said, "Nancy had about as hard a time as most women-easier than some, maybe harder than a few." Quite ordinary as you can see.

Within a few years, in 1811, the family moved to another place on Knob Creek where another baby boy was born, Thomas, but who died in infancy. Remembering, it was said that Nancy cried pitifully as Dr. Potter tried to save the child.

By 1816 the Lincolns' went farther Westward to southern Indiana "Little Pigeon Creek." The cabin was eighteen feet square with packed dirt floor and stone fireplace. The aunt and uncle, Elizabeth and Tom Sparrow, came to live nearby. All seemed right in the circumscribed world of the vast wilderness but where among the thousands of botanics that grew there was white snake root Poisonous.

The milk cows grazed free range and, of course, those hungry stomachs packed in snake root as well as grass and greens. Snake root poisons the milk that people drink. The Sparrows died from the milk sickness. Tom Lincoln made their coffins. Then Nancy Lincoln contracted the disease. She struggled for a week. She'd been so ambitious for her children, wanting them to do better, be better than their parents. She could take comfort in that they knew how to read and write. She died at age 34 in October, 1818.

Little Abe carved the wooden pegs that fastened the coffin in which she was buried the coffin crafted by Tom Lincoln. The green pine box was carried on a sled to the top of a high hill and buried without a funeral service. Abe cried and cried. Some months later Rev. Elkins came by and said a funeral sermon above Nancy's burial site.

Being but nine, Abe was barely able to be consoled. His father put an axe in his hand and directed him out to chop wood for fence rails.

A year had passed when Tom Lincoln returned to Elizabethtown, Kentucky to take up the long time acquaintance of Sarah Bush Johnston, (Yes, that Bush family), a widow. She had three children two girls ages 12 and 10, a boy nine. Sarah's late husband, Daniel Johnston, had always been in debt although he was the Hardin County jailer, a steady job with the perk of living quarters in the jail which Sarah cleaned and cooked for prisoners.

She had to tell Tom Lincoln that still she had debts. He paid them and they packed wagon, stuffing it with belongings and children and made off for Indiana, Tom on horseback. That was in 1819.

Sarah Bush Johnston had been born in Hardin County, Kentucky in December of 1788 to Christopher and Hannah Bush who had nine children. Sarah Bush was tall and straight with curly black hair and was said to be very hardworking but very kind-hearted. She and her new step-son, Abraham (named for his paternal grandfather whose wife was Bathsheba) took to one another immediately, their love for one another deepening as years passed.

Although step-mother Sarah was illiterate, she'd brought books with her such as Webster's Speller and Robinson Crusoe, both of which Abe pored over time after time, she encouraging him. Abe's father saw no profit in it ... A waste of time.

Tom labored on but with his name on the enrollment of the Little Pigeon Creek Baptist Church respectability was further ensured. By 1827 he had accumulated a hundred acres and had begun building a new, better cabin. In the meantime he heard from his wife's relative, John Hanks, in Illinois. There the grass was greener, the soil more fertile and there was no snake root!! Not even finishing the cabin, Thomas Lincoln sold the property and again moved Westward. It was 1830.

He settled first in Macon County but the next year, 1831, they'd moved on to Coles County where they lived at three different locations. It was that year Abraham left home and we know that the following year, 1832, he enrolled for the Black Hawk War and marched northward through our corner of the state so we can put claim to his travels, too.

The Tom Lincoln family finally put claim to acreage on "Goosenest Prairie" in 1840. A double room cabin with a "dog trot between (later boarded up) resulted. Its reproduced likeness is pictured here. By 1845 there were eighteen people living there ... Tom and Sarah, her son John, and wife Mary, with their six children plus Sarah's daughter Matilda and her husband Squire Hall and their six children!!!

Togetherness was often necessity as well as a comfort in the lovely wilderness.

The farm of 120 acres by 1841 needed to be productive, didn't it? Corn, wheat, oats were crops; chickens, geese, hogs, horses, milk cows and sheep rounded out the livestock. Despite the usual variety and labor, Tom Lincoln had to sell a third of the acreage due to "financial difficulties" to son, Abraham, by then a successful Springfield lawyer. In 1848, too, he borrowed another twenty dollars from him to keep the rest of the farm from "forced sale."

Thomas Lincoln died in January 1857 at age seventy-three. Abraham Lincoln was not at all close to his father and did not attend the funeral. He was, however, extremely fond of his step-mother and she of him. He visited her as frequently as he was able. She died in 1869 at age eighty. Abe had kept the forty acres he'd bought earlier so "his mother would have a place to live." She was buried a mile west at the Shiloh Cemetery where Thomas was interred.

In 1860 after his election to the presidency and before leaving for Washington, Abraham visited his mother. It was the last time they saw one another. Their ride to the cemetery must have been filled with talk of sentimental memories, times shared in a variety of places and travels ending there on the "Gooseneck Prairie."

We visited that farm five-to-six years ago. It was undergoing major make-over, perhaps with the 200th Anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth date February 12, 1809 in mind. It was a dreary, rainy day. No one else was there but the background of its antiquity, its stories, was affecting. An adventure with a broke-free cow and a port-a-potty was part of my memory, too!

Those Lincoln sites (with similar period buildings being brought in) are easily found between Charleston and Lerna, Illinois. It is about the only fully-owned piece of property Lincoln ever owned so it has special meaning. Wish we were there on the twelfth to add even more depth to our reverence for that president who kept a nation united and pushed equality of all races forward. He is still a mystery.

Over the years we've learned much about Abraham Lincoln. Books are still being written. Learning a bit about his parents may add a different perspective. His roots turn out to be a sample of the very seeds which formed the foundation of our country both ordinary and extraordinary.

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